Are Stories Like Pictures?
A father sits down with his kids on a rainy Friday evening. There’s nothing to do since the rain is beating down gently on the window. The kids embrace themselves for a stroll down memory lane as the father opens up Medium.
Most of us here have a social media presence, be it on Instagram, Facebook, or all the other new kids on the block. And we’ve posted images of ourselves or of our lives. An occasional scroll will show us fragments from our lives and we can easily walk down memory lane.
On rare occasions, when I’m with my parents, I will open up one of our photo albums from my childhood. My parents would start telling stories about every picture and reminisce about the past. There is something beautiful about the physical scroll through your memories.
After each family vacation, I went with my mom to the local shopping center. We would wait in line to develop our pictures from the film stock of our vacation. It was like magic, seeing all the memories come to life.
But today everything is digital.
And so is our writing. I wasn’t born in an age where people typed on typewriters. As a non-native English speaker, the amount of typos or grammar errors I will do on that thing gives me nightmares.
And as I play on the keys of my keyboard a thought popped into my mind.
Looking at all my writing right now, you can clearly see I care about writing and mental health. It’s a reflection of my current state of burnout and longing for creative fulfillment.
Have I written during my college days, it would have been about career dreams and finding love. And that’s the beautiful thing about writing.
Just like a picture, it reflects our souls.
Scroll through your writing. It doesn’t have to be Medium. I have taken a look at my first-ever story written nearly two decades ago. It will never be published because I can make an entire essay of the mistakes I’ve made there.
But it shows who I was at that point in time.
It’s a story about a geek kid who gets bullied at school and avenges all the cool kids. Back when I have written it I was bullied in school for being different with language and social skills. It’s a very hard time to remember, but it shows me a fragment of myself.
And this is why your writing is so important.
You aren’t just helping others by creating something beautiful out of a white empty canvas. You are writing your own history in time. Your writing is a reflection of you at the point in time you’ve written it.
So next time you write something and you aren’t sure whether it’s good or not, remember that you are also writing your own history.
And who knows, one day you can show your old stories to your kids. They might enjoy a different version of you.
And if they critique you but do it in a good way, you should embrace it.
If you’ve enjoyed reading give it a clap or follow me (no stalkers please :P). I write about the human mind and its story in today’s reality.
