on talking about it here.

I read a quote today from Frederick Buechner’s book, Now and Then. I think it made me realize a little better why it is that I love to write here. Why it is I keep doing it, even when I open up my computer, preparing to write while mentally scanning my own messy interior and wondering how it is I can pull something–anything–redemptive out of there and put it down in sentences.

Or sentence fragments.

But anyway, Mr. Buechner said this:

There is something more than a little disconcerting about writing your autobiography. When people have occasionally asked me what I have been working on, I have found it impossible to tell them without an inward blush. As if anybody cares or should care…

But I do it anyway. I do it because it seems to me that no matter who you are, and no matter how eloquent or otherwise, if you tell your own story with sufficient candor and concreteness, it will be an interesting story and in some sense a universal story…

So yes, I think I am continually compelled to tell my story. We all have one, you know. And though at times it would seem otherwise, we are the ones who help most to shape it–more so even than the others who have victimized, loved, respected, high-fived, or been neutral to us, respectively.

You know I have stacks and stacks of journals? I have been keeping some kind of journal since I was ten years old. They outline my little life. The auditions and dearly loved animals and boys who have come and gone and bits of songs and joys and heartbreaks of loving a family so very much and the decisions I’ve made to try to live in such a way as to make God smile and the failures I’ve had at that–all of that and more can be found in the pages and pages of books that I converted from blank pages to not so blank pages at all anymore.

I guess I think it’s important to a). realize your story and b). articulate it.

And in so doing, we see that life truly is interesting (dear goodness, don’t even think about trying to tell me something ridiculous like you live in Sleepytownville USA and therefore your life is boring. It’s not. You’re there; case in point). And we also see that, though our stories are unique, the themes continually crossover like the lines on a map. And we discover that even though you may live in Illinois and I may live in New Mexico, we’ve all seen Route 66. We’ve all been there. We all know what it means.

But I guess we wouldn’t know that unless we told each other.

Unless we first shared our stories.

And then we get that feeling–that wonderful, human feeling of belonging. The great emotional sigh of contentment that comes after thinking, I’m one of them. I’m part of an ‘us.’ Dear God, I’m not alone, after all.