storytelling, part 1

like everyone else, i've been tagged about four million times for the Facebook "25 random things" meme. (the main reason i haven't done it is that shortly before that fad started, i wrote a "50 random things" meme, so i figure it would be redundant.) i got to thinking about this last night, and coincidentally stumbled across a link (in somebody's Facebook status, no less) to a New York Times blog post on the same phenomenon, which linked to several other articles, and then....well, it was like Wikipedia-hopping, but with online news media. this post has nothing to do with any of those articles; i just thought it was kinda funny that as soon as i started thinking "wow, i should write about this," i found out that everybody else already had.

why is it that so many people have jumped on this meme, been so quick to reveal the intimate--often unnecessarily so--details of their lives to anyone within their privacy settings (which are so often frightfully unspecific)? one theory, and the one i'm most inclined to agree with, is that people recognize and leap at the opportunity to present themselves the way they want to be presented. as a corollary to this: People want to be Known.

this is where it grabs me.
i realized (and subsequently wrote down) over Creating Change:
"my journey this year is focused on the telling of tales."
and perhaps my whole journey is. (why write?)

several of the workshops i went to over that conference were about the use of personal stories to effect change. personal stories can be so powerful, for so many reasons, which i may discuss in another post, but not here.

i also scribbled somewhere recently, unfortunately undated and in an uncertain frame of mind, "The ability to tell our stories is crucial to our development as persons," later revised to "our development of a personal identity." think about it: if you can't tell your own story, how do you know who you are? we are nothing if not the sum of our experiences, external and internal. each person not only has stories, but is a story, or a series of them.

i have a hard time thinking of my life as a novel. it's more like a collection of short stories. maybe that speaks to my attention span, or maybe it speaks to the fact that i have a really hard time putting together one cohesive Story. (i wrote about this a little at the New Year.) or, maybe, it speaks to the fact that things don't always flow together that neatly.

either way, people need to be able to tell their stories--at least to themselves. whether it is oral or manual or written, narrative or poem or song, storytelling is an important way of making ideas, memories, experiences concrete and crystallized. i frequently say that i can't remember anything unless i write it down--which is why i knew when i stopped writing anything for a month in high school that i couldn't go on like that: there was no story. the best of my stories are the ones that are well-rehearsed: i wrote them down somewhere and i've told them many times, and they are inevitably the ones that figure most prominently in my sense of identity.

so how does it come back to people wanting to be Known?....
(why write? because i fear impermanence.)
this seems like a good place to break, and remark that "part 1" in the title implies the eventual existence of a part 2.