Narrative storytelling enables us to derive ideas from the disparate facts, incongruent motives, conflicting emotions, and other absurdities inherent in living dynamically. The narrative that we select to tell our life story acts as a lens that assigns value to our shape shifting experiences: it pulls humor from catastrophes; it places a patina of irony over our checkered history; it allows us to explore our pessimism; and it provides a platform from which vantage point we can optimistically view the future.

Storytelling is the distinctly human implement designed to synthesize our purposeful interaction with reality.

Telling other people our life story changes us in a startling and profound way. The act of telling demands selection, prioritization, evaluation, and synthesis, which intellectual activities increase understanding, make us more sensitive to key distinctions in principles, and expand our empathy for other people.

Sharing stories that fill our chambers with an explosion of unique voices is a means to instigate an inclusive exploration of the intricacies of what it encompasses to be human. Stories enable us to comprehend the ultimate concerns of human existence and explicitly address the unalterable part of humanity.

Writing a sincere narrative account of personal adversities and misfortunes is one way to become acquainted with the rifts of a person’s inmost self, the smothered pieces of want that lie separate and undetected amid the customs, habits, vices, and tedium that encases us in the hubbub of daily living.

Narrative nonfiction is an act of conception and construction; it is formation of a personal legend from the mist of memory using mental hydraulics plied with the tools of logic, structure, design, and imagination. An engaged mind possesses a documentary sensibility that fabricates a memoirist identity, which alliance mollifies their bleak interior critic. A conscientious mind hews a residue of meaning from the verisimilitude of a person’s metafictional baggage. A basic impulse of all free people is to speak to an appreciative audience. Writing the story of our life constitutes asserting the universal human right to declare and define who we are. When we write our story, we become a stakeholder of our place in the world, we affirm the right to shape our future, and avow the verity to heal our torn souls.