Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Do our stories matter?

Lyz Lenz asked today, in her "Men Yell At Me" Substack, "Do our stories matter?"  

If you read and/or write blogs, I think you already believe the answer is an emphatic "YES!" 

But seriously, go read her post. It's a validation of why we write, why our voices and stories matter. 

Key sentence:  "No word is wasted. No story is told in vain." 

I think about the letters that my great-great grandmother and her daughters wrote to her parents & sister in Ontario when the family came west (a story I know I've told here before).  The sister saved those letters, a cousin of my grandfather's found and saved them after her death in 1949, and we still have them today (the originals are now in a museum, and copies have circulated in our family for years now). They are absolute treasures, and we know so much more about our family because they exist, because someone took time to write them and someone else took the time and care to save them.

I don't have any children, and I know it's quite that after I'm gone, the things I've written -- my journals and emails, copies I saved of letters I wrote and sent to other people, this blog, the clippings from the publications I worked on in my professional career -- will all be pitched without anyone ever even looking at them. They could be destroyed in a fire or flood.  The things I write online -- in this blog, in online communities, etc. -- could disappear with a keystroke decreed by some tech overlord. (Some of the online spaces I used to frequent have have already disappeared into the ether and, sadly, all the words I posted there along with them.) 

But I still fantasize that our nephews, or someone, will find these things (or some of them), take the time read them, and understand a little more about who I was -- how I thought, what I felt, why I did the things I did.

And those of you who have read my words here these past 17 (!) years will have absorbed a little piece of me and my story too.  Thank you. ❤ 

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