*Spoilers ahead*

“A Snoodle’s Tale” is a cute (religious-based) short VeggieTales story about a snoodle named Snoodle-Doo who is full of questions and wonders what his purpose is in life.

Snoodle-Doo is so excited to find out that he attempts to fly and to draw but is quickly bullied by the other snoodles.

The snoodles draw horrible depictions of him and place their drawings in his bag- leaving him sad, discouraged, and misunderstood.

Eventually, Snoodle-Doo decides to leave his home and goes away to the top of a mountain where he is found by a kind, caring stranger who invites him to his home.

Inside his home, he talks to Snoodle-Doo and listens to him. He takes the drawings that the other snoodles have made of him and replaces it with a beautiful drawing of Snoodle-Doo that depicts who he truly is.

Snoodle-Doo has questions and the caring stranger answers them all- reassuring him that he deserves to feel as special as he is in the drawing he has made for him.

The stranger also reveals to Snoodle-Doo that he created the snoodles and everything in the landand reassures Snoodle-Doo that he is special.

Snoodle-Doo leaves the creator and flies back home to Snoodleburg, where the snoodles are ashamed of making him feel bad and they fly together as the story ends.

The lessons that I found in this story were mainly about purpose and identity.

Purpose

Like Snoodle-Doo, there comes a time in almost every human’s life where we start to wonder: “Why am I here?”, “How did I get here?”, “What am I meant to do?”, “What am I good at doing?”, and/or “How can I live this life happily?”

As humans, we can find many many answers (all differing and at times very confusing) to those questions. Some people grow up (like myself) being raised and told that God made us and that there are rules in life that one must follow for God. For many people growing up that way, they may agree and go on in life, agreeing to the rules and following them. Some may be confused, overwhelmed, and misunderstood by certain rules and admit to themselves that these rules make little sense to them. Whatever and whichever path one takes, there is no straight-up answer, unfortunately.

Since “A Snoodle’s Tale” is based on Christianity, the answer is that God made us special and unique. That he has created everything and that he gave us the freedom to decide what we do because he believes in free will. It is a simple and valid answer to a very complicated and delicate question.

As for me, I was raised Catholic, but have been confused about where I stand in terms of what I believe and do not believe in. So, in my perspective, the lesson of purpose in this story was about being okay with having questions. There is nothing wrong with admitting to ourselves that we are curious. We have a beautiful ability to wonder and question things, so that is not a flaw in my eyes. But we must be careful about who we listen to. Had Snoodle-Doo remained in Snoodleburg and listened to every opinion a snoodle had about him, he would be miserable and remain miserable. His curiosity led him to keep asking opinions and once he found one that made sense to him, he was able to start believing in his abilities and was able to return back home.

I feel that someone’s purpose in life is going to be different for each individual. Just as each snowflake is different, each human is different and even the ones most similar to each other have differences still. So, for example, basing my purpose on someone else’s purpose makes no sense (to me anyway) because we are each on a different path, living different realities, thinking differently from one another, on the same planet.

Identity

As for identity, to me, this story was more about unpacking what others may think of us and deciding what to believe about ourselves. Society can be cruel. People wander around even at 50, 60, or 90 years old, still getting to know and form themselves. The process is never-ending. And in this life, we will bump into many many people and each one will have an opinion of us. We could take each opinion and value it and carry that opinion with us but it will weigh us down eventually. There will come a point where we will need to unload all of those opinions and hopefully form one of our own.

In “A Snoodle’s Tale” Snoodle-Doo had advice and guidance from God. That may be the route you may want to take if you’re religious. But if you’re not religious, I’d take the opportunity to ask yourself what you love about yourself, why you love that about yourself, and think about where you formed those opinions. Did they come from others or did this opinion come from yourself? If it came from someone else, think about why their opinion matters more than your opinion. And if all of your opinions about yourself came from other people, I would try to work on raising your self-esteem. That’s a very tricky thing to do but it’s not impossible. I’m still working on raising my own so I don’t have much advice on the matter. The only advice I have is that if something you do sparks joy in you (and is a healthy thing to do), make time each day to do it. For me that is writing, so I continue writing, regardless of whether anyone will read what I write.

Although there are most likely more lessons to learn from this story, these are the two I thought about the most.

Thank you for reading!