The backstory

image from here

I was reading an article while my boy slept on the backstory authors have in the process of writing a book. The little pieces that get you to the point where you are ready to begin the story-telling.

I can remember a few months back when I talked about people’s little bio’s. The little snippets of themselves they give in three sentences or less when they meet someone new. Im thinking of starting a new one as I discovered this week that someone typed into google ‘can a baby be born in space’ and found my blog. Astronaut is the new addition to my bio.

Both blogging and life often start with a backstory. A reason to explain where you are, how you arrived here and what you’ve got to say about it. I notice that most of the time when people start a blog its born out of something that happened to them that shapes them into the writer they are today. Some of the backstories come from places of trauma and sadness, of the need to overcome adversity or just an attempt to make meaning from their loss. Sometimes in the sharing of the backstory the unravelling of what brought them to that moment becomes clearer.

I was having a text chat with an old friend (because who has time to actually speak on the phone??) and we were talking about the over-sharing phenomenon that happens to certain people. Having a social work degree doesnt always extend to after business hours but the listening skills you develop mean that if someone is going to make a graphic disclosure about their backstory at the park, at the dinner party or waiting in line at the supermarket its going to be us. I dont have the heart to stop people even when Im late or tired or all full of other peoples stories. The backstory share is the challange of a kind face Im told.

I think when stuff happens that make life more difficult we tend to get frozen to that time. Its as if our lives become the before and then the after and the space in between becomes the material for the backstory that impacts on the stories we are telling now.

Does your backstory impact on the one you’re telling now? Do you share it with other people?

 

Help Blah

Big personalities are a little hard to contend with. All that jostling for space, talking over each other and not really taking turns to speak and share.

I finished something this week that had been hanging like a metaphorical albatross round my neck since last year. I think at the time when I said yes I thought that the helping would make me feel like I was giving back but it really became the opposite. I noticed that in helping I felt more depleted, I felt bossed around and I felt a little sick at the thought of it all.

I couldn’t sleep last night tossing and turning and having imaginary conversations with myself where I stood up to the big personalities, where I told them really what I thought…they’ll remain imaginary because part of the thing of getting older means you realise that clashing with people in spectacular ways isn’t useful. It just inflames things. Walking away on the other hand, realising that helping doesn’t have to mean giving up a little piece of you is the stuff that life lessons are made of.

I’m helping in my own way from now on, I might not have a purpose or a role but Ill have me and that pays it forward more than any way I know how.

Have you ever found that a nice dose of helping actual became a big dose of blah?