Our True Character

The title of the chapter is ‘False Starts’. It’s about characters, essentially, how they change the longer we hang out with them. There’s a deeper truth running through this chapter, though, one that we all can probably learn from whether we write or not.

This might be my favorite chapter in Bird by Bird. It’s super short (all the chapters are short, but this one is only four pages). And it is mostly the story of Anne visiting a nursing home for years despite the fact that she hated going there.

The nursing home illustration shows that once you strip away a person’s outer beauty and busyness, you are left with who they are at their core—and often, that’s nothing like the outer covering.

I explored this idea in depth in my novel, I’m Not Her, which is a twist on the trading places story. To write it, I had to figure out who my two main characters were without the trappings of their bodies, jobs, families, and homes.

Leann was morbidly obese, working as a cashier at a grocery store. She had been a teenage mother, and she and her five-year-old lived with the abusive father, who was much older than she was. Her own mother was a shrill, hypocritical, neglectful woman. Those were the trappings, but when you took Leann out of that situation completely and put her in the body of Carin, my other character, what would she do?

Carin was an affluent, spoiled, beautiful woman who had a meaningless job at an insurance agency, a college degree, a beautiful apartment, plenty of money, and an overly involved superficial mother and absent but successful father. She had a best friend who was true-blue, but who could not recognize her without the body and life he’d known her in.

I realized as I wrote that story that it’s very hard for any of us to see past the superficial. And it’s nearly impossible for us not to judge based on that.

Leann and Carin were not the same people I initially set out to write. They were much more complicated, and they evolved as they embraced drastically new circumstances, families, and bodies.

Who are we when you take away everything else? Lamott compares the old people at the nursing home to trees in winter. They are stripped of everything that made them ‘valuable’, but they are still valuable.

As we age, and physical appearance fades, who will we be? I joke that I am invisible now that I am ‘old.’ They say it’s a teenage belief that everyone is looking at you all the time, but most of us carry that fear all through life. Social media hasn’t helped. Finally free of that skewed perception, it’s been very freeing to not worry so much about appearances or other people’s impressions of me. I live in jeans and t-shirts, my hair up in a clip every day, and rarely take the time for makeup or jewelry. I feel more me now than I ever have.

My husband recently lost his job after 33 years at the same company. He’s in the midst of assessing who he wants to be when he grows up (at the age of 58). While it was probably a little scary at first, now it’s become exciting. He could do anything. He’s not trapped in the labels of ‘engineer’ or ‘director.’

Like my characters, I hope I am still evolving, growing ever closer to my essence and shedding the assumptions and judgments I started out with. I’d like to be better at looking for that same essence in the people around me—seeing past their appearances and bustling to the core of who they are.

Time is such a gift. It brings perspective and appreciation—two things that are often in short supply and that I rarely paused to consider when I was younger.

As Lamott writes, “If you want to get to know your characters, you have to hang out with them long enough to see beyond all the things they aren’t.”

How true that is, not just for the characters on the page but also for the characters in our lives.

Hey, thanks for reading. I know you’ve got lots of options, so thanks for sharing a few of your minutes with me.

Honored,

Cara

If you’re curious about what else I’m up to, check out my website, CaraWrites.com.

If you’d like to subscribe to my twice monthly emails, click here.

If you’re a dog lover, check out my other blog, Another Good Dog. And if you want to know what is really happening in the animal shelters in this country, visit, Who Will Let the Dogs Out, and subscribe to the blog I write there.

I’d love to connect with you on Facebook or Instagram, and I’m thrilled to get email from readers (and writers), you can reach me at carasueachterberg@gmail.com.

My latest novel, Blind Turn is a mother-daughter story of forgiveness in the aftermath of a fatal texting and driving accident. It won the Womens Fiction category of the American Writing Awards in 2022. Learn more about it and find out how to get your copy here.

My most recent memoir, 100 Dogs & Counting: One Woman, Ten Thousand Miles, and a Journey Into the Heart of Shelters and Rescues is available anywhere books are sold, but if you’d like some help finding it (or want to read some lovely reviews), click here.