8 Reasons To Tell Your Story

“Why do I write about myself?” my friend lamented. She went on to say that she worried that she sounded self-pitying, overly dramatic, and self-absorbed.

Here’s the best attitude to have when writing about yourself: don’t focus on what others may think. Write for yourself and yourself alone — at least at first. As a ghostwriter with decades of experience, I say this with confidence.

The story of your personal and professional life is known in the PR business as a bio. Bio length can range anywhere from a published memoir to a single paragraph on a company website.

Some bios are private, told only within a journal or diary. And some are public, revealed a bit at a time in blogs or vlogs.

But all bios tell a story.

The best bios tell a whopping good story

What exactly is a story? It’s a way to structure information so that the listener feels an impact. A story tells us something significant about someone’s life journey. It conveys emotion and values. It has meaning and purpose.

Everyone has a story, but some are more heroic and riveting than others. Stories have impact because they help your audience remember and learn something. Facts and bullet points pale next to the person who simply stands before you and tells a story that comes from their heart.

But why tell your story? Especially if it’s only to yourself?

Because story is medicine in its holistic sense — a healing of the body/mind/spirit, accomplished by what can only be described as mystical internal voyages or visionary quests.

We humans are myth-making creatures. Writing your own story is personal myth-making. It’s an adventure of self-discovery in which you teach and transform yourself first — and then, perhaps, others.

A PR firm I once worked for organized an event in which the guest of honor was Dr. Oliver Smithies, recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

When a journalist asked what advice he would give to young people entering the field of science (there were a number of award-winning young scientists present), Dr. Smithies said, “First of all, make sure you enjoy what you’re doing. If you don’t enjoy it, then change it. Second, work hard. If you expect to succeed as a scientist, plan on putting in five days a week as a bare minimum. And third, keep good notes. You may have gotten something right two years ago, but it’s lost if you cannot remember it and haven’t recorded it.”

Dr. Smithies added, “I cannot bear to do anything but science.”

You write about yourself, for yourself, and to yourself, because you cannot bear to do anything but.

Yet you already know that, don’t you? Or you wouldn’t be reading this. All us bio writers sometimes wonder why we’re so driven to write about ourselves.

What you want are eight reasons not to stop writing. So here they are:

1. Learn what you really think.

2. Unburden yourself by revealing your secrets.

3. See yourself from a more thoughtful vantage point.

4. Build self-esteem and develop inner strength.

5. Experience a safe outlet for anger and frustration.

6. Enjoy a catharsis of your most painful emotions.

7. Relive and reminisce about the best parts of your life.

8. Ponder your past and plan your future.

Here’s a seven-minute video I created that illustrates these eight reasons. Skip watching it if you’re short on time, but do read below what I have to say about why not to stop writing.

Okay… Where do I start?

Maybe at this point you’re saying, “Okay, I agree! Writing my personal story could be a healing, transformative process for me. But it feels senseless sometimes. How do I justify?”

Start by taking a good look at yourself.

Your bio reveals who you were, who you are now, and — maybe — who you hope to become.

To be able to tell someone who you are, you must first discover that truth for yourself. Who is this “I” person telling the story?

Your “I” of childhood is different from your “I” as a teenager, who is different from the “I” adult self. And because stories are about change, the “I” person at the beginning of your personal story is different from the wiser, perhaps kinder or braver “I” who looks back on who they used to be.

I worked with a client who opened her autobiography by telling the reader that she is a stroke survivor whose “mind contains some blanks,” yet who finds “too many memories crowding in on me.” Her name was Margaret B. Harlan and her book, A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven, was published posthumously in 2017. She died in December 2015.

Margaret lets readers know that one of her earliest memories is sitting on the porch steps with her siblings, listening to her father sing about the sinking of the Titanic. She writes, “It sank in 1912, eight years before I was born,” so readers learn early on that this author is now in her nineties.

She writes in chapter one, “I think I was the same person I am now when I was a child.”

This statement is an arresting one, given that memoir is often about transformation, and many autobiographical authors say they are not the same person they were decades ago — or even last year.

You may be like my client Margaret, believing that beneath all these various “I’s” exists the same person you have always been and always will be. How do you reconcile these two conflicting notions?

This question of the ever-changing, yet always-the-same “I” narrator of a bio brings us to the storytelling issue of how and why point of view (POV) changes in a story, and why that change has such an effect on the reader.

Why the “I” of a story changes

When Cheryl Strayed begins her 2012 memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail, she says she was “as low and mixed up as I’d ever been in my life.” The 2014 movie adaptation of Wild stars Reese Witherspoon and was Oscar-nominated, so even if you haven’t read the book, perhaps you saw the film or heard about it.

Strayed starts her journey in a deep depression, primarily because of the loss of her mother to cancer. She ends up not fully understanding the meaning of her long trek, but at least feeling more accepting of herself and others. The theme of her memoir, divulged in its “Lost to Found” subtitle, is about the author finding and healing herself.

At the end of the memoir, Strayed sounds humble, deeply changed. But to accomplish this change in POV required her to write from the wisdom of the soul.

Think of “soul” as that continuous, conscious presence who observes the various “I’s” telling your story from a detached yet compassionate vantage point.

Here’s the secret: the very act of writing itself will change you over time. Trust the process. It’s neither futile nor meaningless. It’s actually sacred.

You are doing the right thing.

Through writing about yourself, you learn that life is not “all about me.” The best stories are more about what it means to be human. They focus on a theme and deliver a message about life that can be universal.

You’ll get there.

That’s the BIG WHY of writing your personal story. I’d like to talk about the hows — but of course, that’s another story.