(2024nov update/comment: while doing some recategorizing, it struck me that this post fit in almost every single category I have on the blog. It really touches everything. It’s very central. It really helps to know the story of your life so that you can tinker with it. It’s a source of great power, in my view. Someone once shared something with me about how… people with no sense of their own story were much likelier to be suicidal. And that makes a lot of sense to me.)
Whenever a friend says something like “I have some time to kill and I don’t know what to do”, I almost always respond with “write your memoirs”. I think it’s one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself. Even if you never finish it or publish it, the act of putting together your life’s narrative is a great exercise, and you develop a sense of clarity that you carry with you.
Once you’ve articulated your own story, you can hit “inspect element” on it, edit it, modify it. I don’t mean “make up false details about your life” – rather, I’m suggesting that experiment with what you choose to focus on, and how you choose to frame it. Stories are extremely powerful tools for getting people to see why something matters, to feel an emotional connection with an idea.
You can use the story of your life to get you to care about yourself, just as you find yourself rooting for your favorite fictional character.
If you share some of these memoirs on a blog (or a vlog, or a podcast – it doesn’t necessarily have to be text), you make it easier for people to find you, learn about you, care about you. Montaigne described this as part of his motivation for writing, and I relate. Derek Sivers said something similar too. The people who discover you through your most honest writing, and love you for it, are the people who you will consider your dearest friends.
There are other reasons still, why writing your memoirs is an excellent thing to do, but I’ll stop here. Oh I guess I’ll just say that people often seem averse to this because they think it’s narcissistic or self-indulgent, like “I’m not running for President”, etc – but think of it less as “presidential memoir”, and more like, you’re a nerd contributing to a fandom wiki, gushing about the plot of your favorite tv show.
tbc
i think this can also be helpful to solidify your memories. i consider my autobiographical memory to be quite poor, which is one reason why i spend a lot of time writing in a journal every day. i don’t quite write memoirs, but i do often write about things that happened in my past and reflect on them.
i think the brain is good at remembering things that are meaningfully connected in some way, so i think that intentionally writing out the “narrative” of your life could help with long term memory, and it could also help you to understand yourself. at the very least, reflective writing has this effect on me.