The Importance of Telling Our Stories

Over the last few weeks I’ve been pondering why I write - why I cultivate this space.

I’ve come to discover that vanity and ego notwithstanding, I write because I want to connect - to myself and to any possible readers. Many of my friends write and/or blog, and I believe most of them do so (as do I) in the hopes that somehow ideas from their insides might work their way out - if only for the writer.

Yet, I also believe there is the hope among writers that as someone works out their inside business someone else might have the courage to do so as well. If not on a blog or on paper, then perhaps in their everyday lives.

Last night, I stumbled across the following quote in Fredrick Buechner’s, Telling Secrets. He says much more lucidly what I’ve been trying to say in this post:

But I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually. - Fredrick Buechner, Telling Secrets

Why do you tell your stories? Or, why don’t you?