stories are important

posted by misterhaan in writing on jul 21, 2016

while i believe a part of me pretty much always knew this to be true, to write love on her arms put it into words: stories are important. just now as i double checked their url i saw “your story is important” without needing to scroll down. because stories are important they also need to be told, and here i have a website but haven’t been using it to tell my stories.

it’s easy to feel like my stories aren’t important, especially to people who’ve never met me. i think a lot of us feel that way. the case may even be that most people don’t care about my stories, but so long as there’s even one person positively affected by a story, that story has value. i have personally heard and read others’ stories and gained perspective or otherwise benefit many times. i think it’s a big part of why wtf with marc maron and beautiful stories from anonymous people are such popular podcasts. when i’ve shared my own stories (mostly spoken so far) i often hear back what my story meant to someone who heard it. from this i conclude that all stories are important, and we should do more to get our stories to the people who need them. while this can apply to jokes, it’s especially true for stories about our life experiences.

look way back in this blog and you’ll see i used to write about how i saw things. even over in my stories a couple of the things i wrote there are about things i actually experienced. there hasn’t been much of anything for a while except for a few technology and web development entries, but i hope to change that. i have a dozen or so subjects to write about listed out, but so far i’ve struggled with whether to write one of those subjects or redesign more of my website. i have a lot more confidence in my ability to write code than to write prose (there’s a lot less you can say with php for example than there is with english), which often makes web development the easier choice. also since i will be posting whatever i write on my website, any improvements to the website itself make the experience of reading whatever i post on it better.

what i mean by all this is that i fully intend to write more. that includes the technical stuff i’ve already started again as well as some thoughtful and life experience stuff. hope you’ll find something you like!