Before It Becomes A Story

 

There’s a weird thing we do now whenever something happens to us.

We immediately start figuring out how we’re going to tell everybody about it.

Something funny happens? 

That’s a story.

Go somewhere cool? 

Better get a picture.

Something big happens in your life? 

Eventually you’re going to have to write the obligatory paragraph explaining how you feel about it.

And I say this as someone who has been writing a blog for ten years and has a podcast where I routinely spend an unreasonable amount of time talking about things nobody asked me about.

I am very familiar with the concept of turning my life into content.

But lately I’ve been thinking about something.

You don’t have to turn everything into a memory yet.

Sometimes you can just…live it.

That sounds ridiculously obvious when you actually write it down, but I don’t think we’re particularly good at it anymore.

We document things while they’re happening. 

We post pictures before we’ve even left the place where we took them. 

We announce things almost immediately. 

And sometimes, while we’re still in the middle of experiencing something, part of our brain is already figuring out how we’re going to describe it later.

I’ve absolutely done it.

I want to have my cake and eat it too.

I want to live in the moment, preserve the future memory, and try to see if I can replicate it.

I’ll be somewhere having a good time and something funny happens, and immediately part of my brain goes, “Oh, I’m remembering that one.”

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Let me make something very clear.

Memories are great.

Pictures are great.

Sharing things with people you care about is great.

Don't ever stop doing that.

But I think there’s a difference between remembering something and immediately feeling like you need to package it.

Sometimes something happens and you don’t know what it means yet.

Sometimes you don’t know how you feel about it yet.

Sometimes the story isn’t finished yet.

And sometimes?

Maybe it never needs to become a story at all.

Not everything that's shot for a movie makes the final cut.

There are things that happened years ago that I understand completely differently now than I did when they happened.

At the time, maybe I thought something was incredibly important that eventually became a footnote.

Or something that seemed completely insignificant somehow became one of those little moments I still remember years later.

That’s the funny thing about memories.

You don’t really get to decide which ones are going to matter.

Your brain does that part for you.

Looking back, some of the most mundane things have stuck with me.

Things that I never thought I'd remember, because at the time, they didn't feel noteworthy.

Yet all these years later, I still remember them.

You can take 75 pictures of something you desperately want to remember forever, and somehow twenty years later the thing you remember most clearly is sitting in somebody’s kitchen at 11:30 at night eating something stupid and laughing about absolutely nothing.

Nobody took a picture.

Nobody posted it.

Nobody knew it was going to matter.

It just did.

And I think there’s something kind of nice about that.

Not everything has to become significant while it’s happening.

Not everything needs an immediate lesson attached to it.

Not every experience needs the inspirational quote at the end.

Sometimes you’re allowed to just have the experience.

Sometimes the memory between those who were there is all you need.

Maybe you’ll talk about it tomorrow.

Maybe you’ll write about it six months from now.

Maybe years from now something will randomly remind you of it and you’ll suddenly realize how important it actually was.

Or maybe it stays exactly where it happened.

Just a small snippet on your timeline.

Between you and the people who were there.

There’s nothing wrong with that either.

I think especially when you’re somebody who creates things, there can be this weird temptation to look at your own life as material.

Something happens and eventually you start thinking:

“Could I write about this?”

“Could this be a podcast topic?”

“Is there something here?”

And sometimes there absolutely is.

Some of the things I’ve written that have meant the most to me started exactly that way.

But I also don't want to reach the point where every experience has to justify itself by eventually becoming something else.

I don't want to be constantly searching for "how to spin this into something."

It's like a cell phone using data roaming, it can get expensive quickly, and it also drains the battery.

That's when you turn the roaming off.

A good day doesn’t have to become a blog.

A funny conversation doesn’t have to become a podcast story.

A difficult moment doesn’t immediately have to become a lesson.

Some lessons take time.

A great memory doesn’t need photographic evidence.

Some of my greatest memories have no pictures, no videos, no documented evidence at all.

And something important doesn’t become less important just because nobody else knows about it.

Maybe that’s the part we forget.

We’ve gotten very good at documenting our lives.

Sometimes we need to remember that we’re also supposed to be living them.

So take the pictures.

Tell the stories.

Write the blogs.

Record the podcasts.

Share the things you want to share.

I certainly plan on continuing to do all of those things.

But every once in a while, give something a little time before deciding what it was.

Let yourself experience something without immediately figuring out how you're going to explain it.

Let a memory become a memory naturally.

Just let it breathe.

And if someday you decide to share it, great.

If you don’t?

That doesn’t mean it mattered any less.

Not every moment needs an audience to have mattered.