Apr 24, 2012 View Comments
This is your life
By: Matt
When I was a child, I received a bumper-sized colouring book every Christmas. I’d immediately set to work with crayons, filling the pages with a chaotic scrawl that each year got closer to staying inside the thick black lines. Eventually, I outgrew this activity and a different type of book began to appear among my presents. When I was perhaps eight or nine years old, I opened my first diary.
Just like the colouring books, the diary demanded that I filled it in, albeit in a different way. First, I’d dutifully enter forthcoming birthdays and family occasions, the the pages in between would wait to be filled with thoughts and missives from my tiny life. Each day brought its own deadline, demanding that something would happen that was exciting enough to write in the diary. But nothing seemed important enough to be recorded, not even on the cheap ruled paper inside my nylon Filofax wannabe.
As a child, recording my own story was a terrifying responsibility. With new platforms for self expression such as blogging and social media, it’s become a casual habit. But are we also recording our stories in ways that we barely notice?