Cinderella Services and the Glass Fit

In the old versions of Cinderella, before the glass slipper and the pumpkin coach were polished into Disney sheen, there is grief. The loss of a mother and the intrusion of an unchosen life. The fairytale begins with Cinderella. A girl desperately alone, unhappy, and dreaming of escape. She has been thrust into a new reality and yearns to return to normality, attend the ball, and live a more self-determined life. Perhaps even with a happily ever after.

But before she can approach the party, Cinderella is given tasks. Over and over again, she must sort lentils from ashes. This is filthy, exhausting work. And the sort of grubby work that requires endless discernment. Then, just when she thinks she has completed it all, she must start again. The process is relentless.

I think this experience - of being pushed into an unchosen life and then forced to scramble in the dirt for something imperceivable, all in the endeavor of doing exactly what everyone else seems to be doing with ease - is familiar to anyone who has had to survive when life takes a profoundly unexpected turn.

To carry grief while forging the grit to keep going. It is the task of discernment under duress. Of sifting through what is burnt to ash and what might still nourish.

In clinical life, this is often the background labour of teams: sorting through the residue of rupture, shame, and silence to find what still holds meaning. This is where administration and policy shape the clinical space, including room bookings, risk assessments, care pathways, managing absences from sessions, handling angry emails, and addressing complaints. It is not glamorous. It is not quick. But it is necessary. We might imagine these tasks should not be so hard. Surely not so endless and messy. Perhaps we dream of teams that work seamlessly: everyone knowing their part, disagreements unfolding without power struggles, no one worrying about having said too much or too little. Who is difficult to engage, who are we not trying hard enough with, and who are we just resisting to honour their refusal? Who has had too much, or too much of the wrong thing, whom can we not say no to? And how do we distinguish between them?

We long for caregiving to arrive through something elegant, something clean. A clarity we can trust. One that doesn’t leave us feeling slightly embarrassed by the mess.

As if success should come without grief or grit.

But it does not.

And relentless, messy labour does not mean we are failing.

Perhaps after all the sorting, we are left with a quieter question: what kind of vessel might hold people without harm? What kind of fit allows for dignity?

Most might not instinctively imagine a glass slipper. I mean, why glass? It is an entirely impractical material for footwear. But then perhaps this very impracticality (its lack of everydayness) is precisely the point.

When I think about the most containing workspaces I inhabit, they are therapy, supervision, and reflective practice. There is little ordinary about how these spaces are held. The performances we enact around the boundaries of timekeeping, how we sit, and how we speak. These spaces can feel heightened, rigidly cult-like, and policed, as if we were fragile flowers - I mean, who really cares if you eat a sandwich during a session? The glass material of the slipper seems to embody this.

So what else does the glass afford? To me, it is the precarious alchemy of containment in relational life: a vessel that holds with transparency, inviting the gaze through its walls, yet ever liable to shatter under careless weight. Its rigidity allows for meaning to be made in the deviation - we start to understand the person through understanding the fit. Glass also breaks when taken for granted - when the quiet miracle of mutual regard curdles into assumption.

Containment, in the matrix of group or therapeutic encounter, demands not isolation but intimacy. And while we might anticipate the slipper’s rigidity as uncomfortable ( and certainly unsuited to the varied terrain of other parts of life), it nonetheless asks us to consider what kind of holding allows for dignity, and what kind of fit wounds?

Wearing the glass slipper also invites an embodied relationship with what it is to let someone or something hold us; each step demands the founding principle of trust, that fragile pact wherein one mind dares to deem another's safe enough to cradle its vulnerabilities. This trust is no relaxed certainty; at least not at the beginning. It pulses with inherent risk, the ever-present shadow of fracture, and thus calls for a radical transparency, layer upon layer peeled back like the slipper's unyielding clarity, lest secrets calcify into wounds. It takes repetition to feel secure.

The slipper, then, is no universal talisman to be thrust upon every foot. It offers holding only for the one whose form it echoes. It is a bespoke embrace that insists on responsible tending, honouring the fit's idiosyncrasies. This is because the very vessel meant to liberate us into the dance can also draw blood.

And what about the ugly sisters? To my mind, they are not simply vain or cruel; when we pay attention, we see they are grieving as well. Their father is gone, their mother demanding, and the slipper becomes a symbol not of joy but of punishment. They are told, explicitly, that to be chosen, they must contort themselves. Cut their feet, shrink their longing, erase the bits that cannot be contained. They are told that once they marry, they won't need their feet.

Their envy is not born of malice but of exclusion, of a desperate hope that love might be earned through self-mutilation. Hiding the overflowing bits. In this light, their cruelty becomes a call for recognition, a mirror of the systemic demand to be smaller, smoother, more palatable. They are not just rivals; they are casualties of a story that offers transformation only to those who try to fit invisibly.

So what might we do? I think we can try to seek out spaces that meet us as we are rather than as we wish or pretend to be. These spaces may lack the reassurance of following orders, the comfort of clear scripts, or familiar roles. They may feel unfamiliar and even uncomfortable at first. But they offer something else: the possibility of trust. Not the brittle trust of performance, but the slow, relational trust that grows through trial and error, attunement, rupture, and repair.