Telling your story

Who are you, that do not know your history? – Ulysses

One of the things that we often fail to do properly is documenting our story. The main reasons that I started this blog wasn’t for any delusions that I could become famous or have a huge number of readers, but because I realised my memory is fallible.

Often, I find that my memory of events differs slightly from the story I told at the time. This isn’t a case of manipulating the facts in my story or anything like that, but purely because I forgot some details, or got confused and merged two events together. When I read through old messages with friends, I’ll say “Oh, that’s right. I forgot that it happened like that.”

Thanks to our marvels of technology, the recorded word is much less permeable than our memories. A lot of us aren’t taking advantage of it, and are letting the most important story of our lives slip away.

As I said, I write this blog primarily for myself. I like to write about my travels because I don’t want to forget the details. I write about my thoughts in these micro blogs because I want to be able to look back on the things I thought about.

Are you really the same as who you were a year ago? I doubt it. If you don’t have some kind of a record of that person and their experiences, you have a very murky negative captured by the negative of your mind.

Naturally, there are some personal topics that you’d prefer to avoid, but generally I would say that there is value to writing down your past.

Even if you feel like you have a good memory now, what if you get knocked on the head and suffer memory loss? Or develop dementia later in life? What if your kids want to know about who you were?

The reasons are many.