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As Story Wranglers here at WordPress.com, we love getting to spend time every day in the Reader exploring the incredible breadth of topics you’re writing about. Here are three Freshly Pressed posts from this past week that we think are must-reads:

Wiggle Wiggle Pinky Toe!

I do it again, this time to confirm that what I thought I had been seeing could actually be real. “Wiggle little toe, wiggle.” Wiggle wiggle it says, as it dances back and forth, proving to me that for the first time in almost six months, I have regained motor control of a part of my lower body.

Arash started his blog, Arash Recovery, to chronicle his fight to walk again after a fall from a third-floor balcony left him paralyzed from the chest down. In Wiggle Wiggle Pinky Toe!, he experiences a physical breakthrough six months in the making. We were on the edge of our seats, chanting along with him, as the will for his toe to move translated into actual, voluntary movement for the first time. This post is a powerful boost for anyone who finds their motivation flagging.

The Only Thing Worse Than a Disney Princess is a Disney Prince

I mean, yeah, there’s a couple of cool fights, but mostly being a Prince is about being in the right place at the right time with a willing pair of lips. It’s about falling in “love” for no reason. It’s about being a plot point, a blank slate, a projection screen. These men don’t have journeys or emotional arcs (or emotions), they just have thrones, pretty faces, and nothing else to do with their time.

Allisms skewered the portrayal of men in most fairy tales and cartoons, and judging by the hundreds of Likes and comments the post garnered, her critique resonated with many of you. Pointed and witty, her post teased out the not-so-hidden messages sent by the classic depiction of princes and princesses in some classic animated films, and made us think twice about whether The Little Mermaid really did have a happy ending.

Simulacra and Simile: This Post is Really, Like, Super Important

The point is: you don’t need anything to actually happen to you (although it does make events richer). You don’t really need to read Pride & Prejudice to get the zombie version, and you don’t really need to hold a gun to be cynical/sympathetic of war. So, when our state of non-being and non-experiencing bumps in to reality, we swing the pendulum back and must overuse hyperbolic adjectives in order to prove that we actually lived…

As bloggers, we spend a lot of time staring at computer screens, trying to find just the right words to get our points across; needless to say, we’re deeply interested in posts taking a closer look at how we use language (and why). We were fascinated by Eating the Pages‘ take on how we use words like “like” and “really”  to convince ourselves that we’re having authentic experiences in a world where so much of what we see, do, and know is secondhand. Thanks to this post, we’ll be more careful about how often these words creep into our speech and what that means.

What were your favorite posts of the week? Did you read something you thought was Freshly Pressed material, but that wasn’t featured? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at  The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.