The Importance of Backstory
On how to share our stories without relying on words
Hi Beyonders!
This week’s essay is from me. Oof, this was a tough one to get on the page. I hope I did! And I hope you enjoy it!
I will be taking the next two weeks off to visit family in England. My parents both grew up in London and I’m lucky to have beloved cousins scattered all over the country and likewise beloved friends in London.
Beyond will be back on June 16th. So much good stuff awaits! I’m excited to share it with you!
xJane
I never feel well. Not for one second. Some days I feel better than others. Sometimes much better (I’m wildly better than I once was for which I’m grateful!). Other days are pure survival mode. On those days, I think if somebody woke up in my body and brain, they would only get out of bed to rush themselves to Emergency whilst I’m already out walking the dogs.
A few weeks ago in Chicago, I was taking a walk with a newish friend through the Bird Sanctuary and she was asking me all sorts of poignant and thoughtful questions about my health in an effort to help. I so wanted to answer them. I so wanted her to know these parts of me. Sharing stories is a natural progression of a deepening friendship. Plus: some small part of me always holds the childish hope that this is the person who can pull me out of the dark quagmire of my post head and brain challenges. But another part is so dang tired of my own backstory, I’d get halfway through sentences and stop – and the conversation lost its footing.
This is a dilemma I find myself wrangling with regularly these days. In fact, it’s happening now trying to write this essay. How do I share what I want to share without exhausting myself (and you!) with the words required to convey it?
I long for Dumbledore’s magical Pensieve where he dumped his most burdensome memories. What a relief it would be to send my own memories into those silvery waters and then hand it to whoever is trustworthy and curious. And perhaps, if it appealed to them, they could hand me their Pensieve. Although, I love hearing other people’s stories straight from their mouths (I mean, look at what I do for a living!). Their histories feel so tender and beautiful and necessary. And their words light me up.
When I shared this struggle with a dear friend who I’ve known since our teens, she said, “Oh, I know exactly what you’re talking about.”
This surprised me. I thought it was something unique happening just to me!
“You do?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
Over a decade ago, her husband had died leaving her with three small children to raise alone. “People who knew me peripherally,” she went on, “would often ask about this. Or, if not, I’d have to explain this ten-year hole in my life, not to mention my third child. And, though I was never unwilling to share, and in fact there were times where I felt it was really helpful and intimate, there was also an equal opposing force within me that felt so fucking sick of my own goddamned story.”
Indeed! And my opposing force has apparently begun to tip the scales. It’s not just with my health; the same is true with any story that involves longstanding hardship or trauma or abuse or grief. Stories that shape us, stories that have the potential to blow open our hearts or conversely to dampen our spirit. It's not that I want to erase my past. Or deny it. Quite the opposite: Every dollop of the past created this Jane and I’m rather fond of her. But I don’t want to tell those stories anymore.
This desire to still be known combined with the inability to speak my story aloud has me thinking about who we are without backstory. Ram Dass popularized the notion of be here now. And it’s certainly a worthy goal as, in theory, it allows for freedom from suffering. Yet what happens to us if we stop telling our stories? As a society, we are admonished to tell the stories of our ancestors in the hopes the horrors weighed upon so many of them will not be repeated. I believe this to be true. I share my ancestors’ stories whenever I can squeeze them into a conversation; I’ve written essays about them and a novel inspired by them. Whilst they’re stories of war and poverty and loss and grief, they are also stories of community, love, and hope.
And: I didn’t live them.
To live stories is a whole other thing, especially the hard stories.
My friend goes on to say, “There’s always this push me/pull me thing of wanting to be open and honest, being sick of feeling defined by this thing that wasn’t of my own volition, and also knowing I was never being one hundred percent honest about the brutality of it, because, really, in my heart of hearts, I felt like no one really wants to know all that.”
Oh, reader, yes. To truly tell the story of my health requires sharing so much of the brutality of life (I know this is true of many, if not all of you, as well). Some of which I have shared in past essays, but not all of it. It’s too much to put on someone else. And it’s too much to dig up from within. And, here we go again with the words, for so much of it, the words don’t exist. The older I get, the more I recognize that no matter how glorious and efficient words can be, no matter how much they can save us, they can fail us too. And maybe those are stories that were never meant to be told with words in the first place. Maybe those are the stories of knowing that can inexplicably happen when beloveds are joined – and sometimes beloveds are people or animals whom we’ve just met.
Luckily, I carry a lot of joy. Where this joy comes from, I’m not sure. But it’s there, pulsing and flowing through me steadily. Even on hell days, even when I’m terrified by how awful I feel and frustrated by how much I’ve lost of my former life, I delight over the squishy sounds my kitty Rudy Lu makes whilst cleaning himself, or my doggie Delilah rolling instantly onto her back in the morning in bed when I sit up and she knows it’s massage time. I can giggle at the squirrel shyly greeting me from the crook of the tree, listen with gladness to friends unfold their lives, and be flooded with electric love when I spend time with my niece, her husband, and their beautiful new baby, my great nephew, even when my body is in shambles. Every day, I am carried by joy. To the point that most people, even those close to me, have no idea how much I’m struggling. And perhaps I don’t know the same about them.
I have long been in search of ways to know each other more deeply through our stories; Beyond is a manifestation of this.
And now I am in search of ways to know our stories without relying on words.
“Our stories are so different,” my friend says of our journeys, “and yet exactly the same,”
And isn’t this true for all of us?
If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like this one about loneliness:
A beautiful essay, Jane. In the beginning of it you gave as good a glimpse into your "story" as word can provide with this sentence:
"On those days, I think if somebody woke up in my body and brain, they would only get out of bed to rush themselves to Emergency whilst I’m already out walking the dogs."
I know exactly what you mean, Jane. And your essay got me thinking of this conversation I had a long time ago with a new friend. We were in the "getting to know you" phase and when he mentioned that he had a brother who had died, I gently asked him what had happened. And he answered, and his response is something that has stayed with me for decades, "We're not there yet." I was baffled. What did he mean? We were there, since he put it out there so how could we not be there? Only now, with time and your honest and thoughtful essay, do I understand what he really was saying.