What's Your.... Origin Story?

Carrie Klewin Lawrence – Origin Story 

When we moved from Maryland in the summer of 2021, I was given a couple boxes of elementary school memorabilia by my mother. Two small, sad printer copy paper boxes yellowed and brittle with decades of storage dust and must. I was like “I’m sure that I don’t want any of this”. I smirked a polite “thank you”, as my mother celebrated her reclamation of a few cubic feet of storage space. And after a few days, I feel worn down by the weight of the unknown. I took a deep breath – we were packing up our entire house again for the 6th time in like 8 years – and I was like OK let me see what I can salvage from these boxes – maybe my kids would get a kick out of something inside – cause they are all elementary school-aged now.

In this box, among the traditional fingerpaint drawings, I discovered a play script. Something I wrote when I was in fifth or sixth grade that’s titled “Little Red Riding Hood Says NO to Smoking”. I co-wrote a social justice play when I was my oldest daughter Genna‘s age.

And in that moment when I read the title and recognized that I wrote this when I was 10 years old, that I was already on this path of who I am and what I am currently doing 40 years later... In that moment, my origin story clicked into place. I had a knowledge and a power as a result of that knowledge that instantly changed my perspective on my career path over the past several decades.

You see, I am a stage director. I’ve been doing theatre since before I can remember (apparently). And I didn’t even attend a college that had a theatre program. Well, there were several, but nothing you could major or even minor in. I had lost my true north on the way to success and stability. I majored in Public Relations and started working for a chemical corporation. I was actually quite miserable.

Before I graduated from college I had directed several shows for many of the extracurricular groups I was involved with. Eventually, I went on to pursue my MA in Theatre and Performing Arts at NYU, and then my MFA at The Catholic University of America. Imagine if I had just gone to an arts school from the beginning. Imagine if my interests, resources, opportunities, and familial support had been in alignment?

As a result of my origin story breakthrough discovery, in my personal branding workshops I started asking people what’s your earliest memory of your career path or what can you remember about what you wanted to do when you grew up – or maybe an early memory of recognizing your career dreams?

My friend Heather talked about being under the kitchen table when her family would listen to classical music together in the kitchen - she would draw pictures as a visual response to the music and I was instantly like oh yes - in your work as a painter, you tell visual stories and every personal statement that you’ve ever written you have a descriptive storytelling quality to your work. It seems so obvious.

Some things really started clicking for me. I want to investigate - at what age do we already know, or exhibit abilities related to who or what we want to be - that if somebody’s paying attention - or if given the opportunity - can we become the thing that we were meant to be. Can we identify that potential early on?

Or if we get off the path, if we get distracted, or take detours (either willingly or unwillingly), and you still have that drive in you – that knowledge that you just can’t shake – that you should be doing something else – you were meant to be someone different – are there tools to help people identify their origin story... track back to the inciting incident... and get back on track?

I think the majority of us know the truth when we are young but then get convinced otherwise.