Storyboarding one’s life

Storyboarding one’s life is a metaphor for planning a desired future, borrowed from the process of drawing a comic-like sequence before filming it. In Stella’s conversations with Gerry, the idea grows from an appealing word into a way of considering how she wants to live, what remains possible in old age, and whether her husband belongs in the life she is trying to shape. The metaphor promises deliberate design, but the scenes around it expose how little of that design Stella can control—and how differently she and Gerry inhabit their marriage.

Meaning and Film-Making Metaphor

The explanation is practical: storyboarding means planning ahead, mapping things out, and setting down how one wants events to happen. In film-making, drawings establish the sequence before it is filmed. Stella likes the term, and its appeal lies in the sense that a life, too, might be examined as a sequence and considered before its next part unfolds. The metaphor does not mean that she has a detailed written plan; it gives a name to the act of imagining and arranging what may come.

The phrasing also carries a tension between intention and uncertainty. A storyboard can specify what its maker wants to happen, but Stella’s future is not a film she can simply direct. Her use of the idea therefore encompasses both agency—the wish to make choices about her remaining time—and the risk that those choices may not include the people who expect to share it with her.

Stella’s Future and Religious Search

Stella first uses the phrase to describe what is occupying her thoughts: she is storyboarding her life. When Gerry asks about the woman she visited, Stella says she is tired of living as they do and wants to consider how best to live and how to live a good life. She identifies the word devout, which she associates with her childhood, as a description of the life she now wants to explore. For her, this involves charity and prayer; she presents it as an inquiry she must answer for herself, not a decision Gerry can make on her behalf.

This search gives the metaphor a moral dimension. Stella is not merely arranging activities or imagining a change of scenery: she is asking what kind of life would be good, and what practices might make it so. Her stated wish to use the time she has left for something other than watching Gerry drink makes the question urgent. Storyboarding names the effort to imagine a different pattern of days, even while Stella has not settled on exactly what that life will require.

The Begijnhof visit puts one possible form of that future under pressure. Stella learns that women can still live there, but that the waiting list may stretch to five years or more. Applicants must be women prepared to live alone, aged between thirty and sixty-five, and able to afford it. Faced with those conditions, Stella concludes that she is too old. The encounter turns an abstract future into a set of concrete restrictions: the life she is considering has an institutional threshold, a long delay, and a financial requirement. Her age makes the imagined route unavailable on the terms she hoped to find.

Gerry’s Place in the Plan

The metaphor becomes a direct test of Stella and Gerry’s relationship when he asks whether he appears in her storyboard. She answers that he does not, or at least not really. The brief reply makes explicit that her plans may not be plans for the two of them together. Earlier she had described their companionship as being lucky enough to have each other to ignore; now the future she is considering has room for a life outside their familiar arrangement.

The contrast is especially sharp because Gerry’s question is followed by his concealment of a drink. While Stella sleeps, he takes a half-bottle from his jacket pocket and drinks in the bathroom. He has already worried about a bottle making noise in the lift and imagines excuses that could explain it away. Back in the room, he uses a blank telephone pad as a coaster, anticipating that the glass will leave a wet ring when lifted. His private drinking and rehearsed cover stories give substance to Stella’s wish to live differently: the concern is not only a general dissatisfaction with their routine, but a routine in which Gerry continues to hide alcohol from her.

Gerry is troubled by the possibility that he has no place in her plans, yet the scene does not show him answering that exclusion with openness. Instead, he drinks in secret. The storyboard thus holds two sharply different forms of planning in the same hotel room: Stella’s attempt to imagine a changed life, and Gerry’s immediate calculations for preserving his drinking without being discovered. The wet ring he expects on the pad is a small, visible trace of what he is trying to conceal; her answer, by contrast, leaves uncertain what place he might have in her future.

Age, Memory, and the Limits of Design

Stella’s effort to picture a future exists alongside a fear that time may take away the ability to think and choose. She maintains a crossword routine as mental exercise, recalling that her mother and grandmother experienced decline in old age. She also notices Gerry forgetting repeated conversations and events, including what they are having for dinner or that they are due at a reception. These observations make the future she is trying to map more than a matter of personal preference: it is shadowed by the possibility of diminished memory and by the losses she has witnessed in her family.

Her reflections on age are physical and particular. After crying, she sees round red marks on her thighs and recognizes them as the prints of her elbows from leaning forward with her head in her hands. The marks bring back a childhood doll, while thoughts of a school certificate and a card recording her baby’s weight send her across decades of memory. She fears that memories may disappear as suddenly as pigeons taking flight. Against that fear, her crosswords are a modest, repeated practice of keeping her mind active—not proof that she can control what aging brings, but something she can continue to do.

The expression’s lasting significance lies in this gap between imagining a life and securing it. Stella can name the wish to plan, articulate the devout life she wants to explore, and recognize that living alone remains possible even if the Begijnhof is closed to her by age and waiting time. Yet the storyboard cannot guarantee an easy ending, preserve memory, or make Gerry change. It gives Stella a language for treating her remaining years as something she may still shape, while the surrounding details—her age, the rejected residency, Gerry’s hidden bottle, and her fear of forgetting—show how uncertain that authorship remains.