Keely Balfour
“Painting My Own Road”
I began thinking seriously about this while struggling to write a coherent family narrative of my own. I kept searching for a clear and linear story, something that would make immediate sense to others, but every version felt incomplete. At one point, I was talking with my close friend Elizabeth about the pressure many people feel to have a clear “thing” or narrative that can be easily understood and rewarded. Some people seem legible at first glance: the athlete, the activist, the future banker, the person defined by one hardship overcome. Elizabeth said she felt she lacked that kind of clean storyline. What struck me was not simply her frustration, but how common that feeling is. Institutions and social spaces often reward simplicity. Complexity may be more honest, but legibility is easier to recognize. That conversation made me reconsider this assignment entirely. I was being asked to engage my own personal archive, yet I found myself unsure of what that even meant. Did my archive need to resolve into something coherent? Was it supposed to reveal a singular truth about who I am? And if it did not, was that a failure of the archive or simply a reflection of how identity actually works? I came to suspect that the problem was not that I lacked a story, but that I was trying to flatten myself into one. Human lives are rarely linear or internally consistent. We contradict ourselves, reinterpret our pasts, and carry identities that matter differently depending on context. Yet archives, applications, family lore, and social categories often ask for a cleaner version. They encourage us to become summaries of ourselves.
In many ways, adulthood seems to involve learning how to package complexity into something consumable. The problem is that what becomes easiest to understand is not always what is most true. I have felt this flattening most strongly through the label of being a foster care child. Even writing that phrase feels strange because of how much it implies before I get to speak. People often hear it and immediately imagine absence, instability, trauma, or damage. If they are feeling charitable, perhaps resilience. In other words, they begin writing the story for you before you have said a word. The label functions like an archive entry: technically informative, emotionally incomplete. It describes a legal and bureaucratic reality, but not the texture of my life. It does not explain affection, humor, routine, loyalty, or the many ways family can exist outside the narrow model people often assume is standard. What frustrated me was never that the category existed, but that others so often treated it as sufficient. They confused documentation with understanding. There is a difference between knowing a fact about someone and knowing what that fact meant to them. A file may indicate placement, dates, and movement. It cannot automatically explain whether a child felt safe, loved, confused, grateful, angry, or entirely ordinary. The archive may preserve what happened administratively while losing what happened emotionally. Too often, institutions treat their records as though they capture the whole truth.
My primary research into my own personal archive reinforced this idea. In conversations with my grandmother and uncle conducted for the purpose of this paper, they rarely described my childhood through the language institutions would use and instead pushed back against the rigid, systematic ways of thinking through which institutions often try to define lives. They spoke instead about routines, humor, loyalty, stress, resilience, and the ordinary habits that make up family life. When I asked whether they would characterize my childhood as “good” or “bad,” both immediately rejected the premise that it could be reduced so neatly. My uncle, inclined to see the glass half full, emphasized trips to Disney World, water parks, and how I always seemed to have the American Girl dolls I wanted. In his telling, my childhood was idyllic, despite a few tumultuous periods. My grandmother’s answer was more nuanced. She also described tennis, soccer, frequent trips to the mall, and the way I often received what I wanted, but she did not omit the more difficult realities: coming home in tears after struggling to make friends, the lingering effects of trauma inflicted by my mother, and the early signs of OCD. Even so, she still ultimately described it as a good childhood, one I should not regret.
What interested me most was not deciding which version was correct, but recognizing that both were. Their answers differed partly because of proximity. My grandmother lived with me and witnessed the day-to-day texture of my life in fuller detail. My uncle knew me through a more partial but still meaningful lens. Their responses also reflected temperament: one more matter-of-fact, the other more instinctively optimistic. The same childhood produced different archives depending on who was remembering it. Had I framed the question differently, I likely would have received different answers again. This made clear that there is no singular, objective version of my childhood waiting to be uncovered. There are instead multiple narratives, each partial, each shaped by memory, personality, and perspective. To force the experience into a single label such as good, bad, traumatic, or privileged would risk doing violence to its complexity. The most accurate word for my childhood may simply be complicated. It was multidimensional, containing realities that might appear contradictory but nonetheless coexisted. That realization also changed how I think about authorship. If no archive offers a complete account, then the person whose life is being narrated must have some role in defining its meaning. For me, self-definition does not mean choosing one version and discarding the others. It means holding tension between narratives that seem mutually exclusive and recognizing that they can both be true at once. It also means refusing to be reduced to versions imposed from outside and taking part in shaping how those truths are understood.
It was Mary Elizabeth Baxter’s story in Paint Me a Road Out of Here that helped me
arrive at this way of thinking in the first place. Although our lives diverge in many ways, I recognized in Mary, a former foster youth whose life moved through incarceration and into artistic authorship, a shared history of being described by systems before being understood as a person. More importantly, her work offered a model for thinking differently about my own archive. One of the most striking moments in the film is when Mary uses her artwork to juxtapose the institutional narrative imposed upon her with the life that later unfolded beyond it. The state’s diagnosis of schizophrenia attempts to fix her identity through pathology and administrative judgment. That diagnosis carries the authority of official language. Yet Mary refuses to let that record stand alone. Through her exhibit, testimony, and the evidence of later intellectual growth, academic success, creativity, and self-possession, she places that earlier classification beside realities it could never contain. What the state names as deficiency, Mary reframes through evidence of capacity. Notably, her act of self-authorship does not depend on erasing the past. She does not destroy the diagnosis or pretend those records never existed. Instead, she absorbs them into a larger narrative she now helps control. Her archive becomes layered: the version once chosen for her by institutions and the version she later constructs for herself. Her life is shaped by both, yet reducible to neither. She exists within and beyond the records attached to her.
Watching Mary articulate that layered identity throughout the film was deeply inspiring to me. The film showed me that reclaiming an archive does not require denying what institutions once recorded; it can mean placing those records within a larger story authored by the self. My own archive contains labels and paperwork that describe what happened to me administratively, but not who I became through it. Like Mary, I am less interested in erasing the record than in refusing to let it have the final word. Faced with labels that felt reductive, I have often imagined success as a way to answer them. In fact, there is something quietly ironic in being at Yale now, writing a paper about that desire, at an institution that once represented the kind of counter-narrative I hoped achievement could create.
My personal resonance was shaped not only by Mary’s story, but by the documentary’s formal logic. In Paint Me a Road Out of Here, Catherine Gund does not merely argue that identity is layered; she makes the viewer experience the instability of any single narrative through the film’s structure. Mary’s archive is not only a subject of the film, but one of its methods, while Faith Ringgold’s mural For the Women’ s House becomes another contested archive through which the documentary thinks. Through a scrapbook-like editing style that moves across time periods, voices, institutional records, artwork, and present-day reflection, the film braids Mary’s personal history with the mural’s afterlife. Rather than following a linear progression, it assembles meaning through fragments and juxtaposition, allowing competing versions of events to coexist without resolving them into a single account. This formal approach reflects the same realization I had begun to reach in my own life: no archive can fully contain a person or a thing.
This fusion of form and theme is especially effective because the documentary does not simply tell us that identity is negotiated among competing narratives; it makes us experience that negotiation through the act of watching. By juxtaposing institutional voices with Mary’s testimony and the perspectives of other artists, the film shows not only who has the authority to define a life, but how that definition is constructed in the first place. Meaning does not reside in any single record, but emerges through interpretation, context, and perspective. As Tina Campt writes in Listening to Images, “we must not only look but also listen for it in other, less likely places” (Campt 17). Her insight clarifies what the film achieves: it attends to what exceeds documentation, using voice, memory, and visual juxtaposition to surface meanings that institutional records alone cannot capture. In doing so, the documentary suggests that no institution, archive, or single narrator should hold exclusive authority over meaning. Instead, identity emerges through a negotiation among partial and often conflicting accounts. What began for me as a personal question thus becomes a broader inquiry into how narratives are constructed, whose voices are privileged, and how complexity is either preserved or flattened. But that broader lens also turns me back inward, to my own archive, and to the question of how I might engage it differently.
Inspired by Faith Ringgold, Mary, and the other artists in the film, I attempted to create a collage of my own, amateur as it may be. Much like the film and its central figures, I did not try to produce a single, coherent narrative. Instead, I approached my archive as something to be assembled, placing fragments beside one another and allowing meaning to emerge through their tension.
While walking and trying to think through how to finish this paper, I came across a woman named Hannah Sage with a sign at her feet that read, “Ask me for a poem” in large font. So I did. I was longing for a sense of presence and groundedness in the midst of a chaotic finals season at the end of a difficult junior year. I remember feeling disheveled, my eye bags heavy and my thoughts scattered, but also strangely honest, like I was fully myself in that moment, somewhere between exhaustion and hope. I told her just enough, and within minutes she wrote a poem for me. When she used the word paint, given the film’s title and its themes, it felt like an invitation, or at least something I needed to follow. I placed her poem, which captured both my multitudes and my authenticity, at the center of my collage.
This is me painting my own road. The collage I created reflects that shift. Surrounding the poem are images of me taken across different moments during the past few weeks, some at night, some during the day, some alone, others with people. In one sense, I am a foster care child. In another, I am a Yale student. In some moments, I feel hopeful. In others, I feel completely undone. All of it is true. This collage offers a glimpse into who I am, but even that is not fixed. Time, perspective, and context can shift what is seen and how it is understood. And even then, I exist beyond it. Necessarily so.
That is what the film makes clear, and what I am beginning to understand for myself. To be human is to exist in multitudes. We do not need to resolve that complexity in order to be legible. We need to make space for it. We have archives, but they are never complete. They are always expanding and always being rewritten. In response to the labels and categories imposed onto us, we can take authorship not by erasing what came before, but by adding to it, reframing it, and painting over it in new colors. This summer, I will let my grief pool like paint on the sidewalk, like Hannah wrote. But I will do more than that. I will pick up the brush. I will choose what to carry forward, what to layer over, and what to make visible on the canvas of my life. I think what the film ultimately taught me is not to resolve that complexity, but to celebrate it. In myself, in others, and in life more broadly. It is possible to follow Mary’s example and paint a road out of here for yourself. So where is “here”? It is not fixed. It moves with us. In the end, we get to decide.