There might be a backstory…..

Sometimes I think everything in my life has a backstory, like volumes of them. Maybe it comes from being adopted. Being adopted is like being born with a backstory that is both a mystery and a secret, but shades all the other stories for the rest of your life.

Maybe having layers of backstory is a Generation X phenomenon. We brag about no seat belts and partying all night and showing up at work in the morning, but we also were a culture of what happens at home didn’t really happen, so don’t ever mention it again, not even to yourself.

Or maybe all my backstory comes from growing up with a book in my face. I learned literally about the weaving of words to create imaginary worlds, while people spoke around me, believing a book made me invisible. I learned in the stories on the pages and the ones told around me that every thought, feeling, and action is usually multifaceted and connected to string of other thoughts, feelings, and actions and one must walk the strings between them like a spider weaving her web. Some strings are good, some are like deathly traps of the stickiest glue. I am like an agile spider, very good at walking on all the right strings.

Sometimes I see my exodus from the classroom like the scene in Charlotte’s Web, when all the baby spiders are balloning away. I am putting my string out in the world, and trusting the wind to carry me to a new place to start my new story. Except the issue is I am not a baby spider. I am a wise, elder spider and I have accumulated too many strings. They have become so jumbled, and it’s hard to know which ones will set me all the way free. Sometimes I think I have cut the right ones. But then the knot shows up and pulls me back towards the stickiness.

I have been drawing Charlie Says for a few weeks now. Some of oldest friends and family see her as my alter ego, and there is some truth to that, but right now, she seems like a character who has no backstory. Each panel reveals a bit about her. She wears boots. She likes football. She has a cat. She plays the lottery. She lives somewhere with a porch and a couch. But right now, Charlie doesn’t have friends, or any family. She doesn’t appear to have a job, and no one really even knows how old she is. Not even me. I draw her every morning and sometimes I am not even sure what is going to come from the pencil, except for the red boots and crazy hair.

Sometimes I draw what I am doing–like shopping, or sitting on the porch, or having a mammogram. But I am not drawing so much of what I am experiencing. I think Charlie Says is sort of my attempt at writing a story without a backstory, but it feels a bit random and lonely. I guess that’s how I feel sometimes. Random. Lonely.

I go to my part time museum job and dress in costume. I don’t have to wear the costume, but I like it. It feels like being playing a role in stage. When I leave and take off the costume, I am myself again. I never had that separation when I was teaching. I don’t even feel like I have completely left the classroom now. Teaching shows up in my dreams almost every night.

Wearing a costume at the museum has allowed me to remember that it is a job, a path I am choosing to take, but it doesn’t have to be my life unless I want it to be.

Even though this museum job feels like a part in a play, it also feels like an audition for the rest of my life. For the first time in my life though, I am auditioning for myself, constantly asking, who am I now, and who do I want to be. What part of my backstory gets to be told and what is being set free?

So when I draw Charlie every morning, she has the swagger of my twenty-three year old self–the girl before the kids, the career, the loss, the grief, the battles. But she has the eye of a woman who can be real because she has lived through some shit.

If Charlie continues to emerge from the pencil, I image her story will also emerge. It’s hard to be any kind of person, even one drawn on page, without a backstory.

But maybe I don’t have to know hers yet.

Maybe that is the point.

For most of my life, I have been walking through a library of stories I didn’t write, trying to understand how each one connected to the next. Now, every morning, I put a blank piece of paper in front of me and draw a woman in red boots.

She doesn’t know where she’s going.

Neither do I. For once, that feels less like being lost and more like being free.