Everyone Has A Story To Tell

I’ve taken to people-watching lately, not for the sake of merely watching, but out of genuine deep curiousity. I look at people and wonder what kind of lives they lead, what secrets they keep, what dreams they harbour.

I look at young children and envy their innocence but, at the same time, I deeply worry about their future, what with the disturbing trends in recent years — drug abuse, increasing divorce rates, teenage pregnancies at a younger age, paedophiles, violent crimes.

I look at people in their teens and their twenties and how I long to tell them — you are only young once, make the most of your youth! I look at them and wish that, when I was their age, I knew then what I know now.

I look at middle-aged people and wonder if they even realise that they’ve used up half their lives already, that there’s very little time left, but it’s never too late to change, to clean the slate and start over, to start something new.

I look at old people and I feel startled with the realisation that they were once adolescents who made the same mistakes as everyone else, they were once young people who fell in love and got hurt, they were once middle-aged people who either made a difference or simply let their lives pass them by. I long to ask them what their lives were like, what they’d do if they can live their lives all over again, how they feel now that they are at death’s doorstep.

I know that everyone has a story to tell and I believe that, given the opportunity, they would gladly share it. I suppose this is the main reason why blogs are so popular. People have stories. They want to be heard. They want to voice out their thoughts and fears and dreams, if only someone would listen.

But while some people find release and closure by making public confessions (such as in Oprah), I believe far more people would opt to do so anonymously, as the cloak of anonymity gives them more freedom in expressing their heart’s deepest darkest secrets and desires.

Take the case of PostSecret, where people send in their secrets written on homemade postcards. Some of the confessions are funny, many heart-wrenching, others shocking. There’s a postcard of a newly wed couple, their faces covered with stickers, with the handwritten note “We were not mean because we didn’t like you. He is our daddy, we know how violent he is… We were trying to save you.”

OneSentence, on the other hand, features “true stories, told in one sentence”. The most popular story from the last 30 days reads “Seven months after she ruined my life, her name is still in all of my passwords.” The most popular of all time is “I held my father’s hand as he died in that hospital room and realized I’d never held his hand before that moment.”

Then there is Six-Word Memoirs, where people are asked to sum up their lives in just six words, no more, no less. A book called “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure” has already been published in February 2008, featuring more than 1,000 of these mini autobiographies. The site is now inviting submissions to be considered for their next six-word memoir book.

• funny (“Our lips meet. Ugh. Bad breath.“)
• pathetic (“I will never be good enough“)
• poignant (“never got over my first love“)
• bittersweet (“he left, now I can breathe“)
• heart-breaking (“That avalanche killed me too, Son“)
• defiant (“Cancer is not a death sentence!”)
• smartaleck (“Hillary, why did you marry Bill?“)
• just plain bored (“At a meeting. I’m so bored“)
• to outright scary (“Abused psycho kid; Serial killer secrets“)

What about you? What’s YOUR life story?