Proselytizing schoolgirl,
Dressed and controlled by the desires of others as she adheres to what she thinks they expect of her as a good girl.

In doing so, it's frequent that there really isn't anyone deliberately controlling her---so, expecting safety and control by another, her unintentional free motion gets her tangled and hung on the strings. Eventually she realizes it, climbing up her own constructed strings to emerge from the gray haze into the dichotomized lights and darks of the sky above, crossroads from which she splits and explores...

"Okay, so what should I do? I promise I'll do a good job... Or, at least, I'll try!"

The Gibbeted Puppet is the oldest of these characters, at least in these forms. She was created in the middle of high school, during a period of time when I was getting increasingly bitter about not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. All I had known, it seemed to me, was how to create my own little worlds inside myself, or how to do what others told me to do; indeed, that all external things, from interaction with others to fulfilling responsibility, all I knew how to do was follow a role I was provided with.

I became extremely 'fond' of Dave Matthew's "Gray Street", with my mental imagery of a housewife in a suburban neighborhood, looking out at the gray sky and gray rain, gray light reflecting off of everything. No matter how many lights she might turn on, nor how much painting of the house or of canvases she might do, the gray didn't seem to ever go away. Another came along, an older man, a shaman or prophet perhaps, telling her how to get out of there---but she doesn't believe him, and calls the police about the person lurking in her yard. And she's left alone, within her own mind, trying to change things but never changing the structure of her life---so no matter how much she changed the details, everything turned out the same. And she trapped herself.

And I thought of all my tiedye shirts whenever the phrase about the colors should come up... thought of my own disinclination to talking whenever it spoke of her saying none of her thoughts. The period of time in which I created the drawing of the Gibbeted Puppet was the period of time in which I began to experience a 'bile sense', a sensation of some uprising in my chest and tastes as though I might puke. It's the time period in which my mom observed that I seemed to stop aging, emotionally, and got stuck on some ghosts of my past.

Now, the original summary that I created for the Gibbeted Puppet was that of a school girl, in uniform... she's neither obnoxious nor silent, but rather quiet and nice, friendly. She follows the rules, she does what she's told. It doesn't even really occur to her not to. So accustomed to being the role of the school girl... that one of the puppet strings guiding her actions tangles around her neck and chokes her. And there she hangs, gibbeted, a puppet of a young girl who never realized who she was.

It terrified me. That was what I felt about it. It was an image that horrified me in some way, but I refused to unmake the image. It had occurred to me that people will often avoid looking at unpleasant things, and so the unpleasant things will linger, and they just turn into Pleasantville or Stepford people, following their gender- and job- roles, with a smile on their plastic faces as they walk carefully within the boundaries of where they're allowed to walk.

It terrified me, but I didn't want to alienate people, I didn't want to simply become an angry, rebellious teen. And I didn't see how to be me without doing either first. So... with misgivings, with doubts, with fears, I stepped into her and kept my eyes down and avoided real arguments or discussions for a while.

It was, of course, around this time period that Brad should ask me out. And in the more than two and a half years since then, he and I have rather focused on one another. He became the only person I was having these conversations with for a long time... and when it got to the point that I'd need to talk about things like these, I began to hesitate to talk. That lasted a little while, in the beginning of college, when I seemed to drift away from everything. My friends from home, my family members, and I didn't really act to try and make friends or involve myself in school. I continued to drift, puppet without a puppetmaster, getting increasingly angry with myself.

And so, during the first year of college, my journal has references to the puppet: and to the time when she climbed up the strings to sit upon the wooden 'X' that the strings hung from. She untied herself, and sat there, on the wooden shape floating upon the gray haze, staring up at the divided sky of night and day.

To leave where you have been, you first need to go somewhere else.

The more simplified things are, the easier it is to get another train of thought into my head. So I simplified everything that had been and tucked it beneath a horizon of gray, and tried to think of the world in extremities.