Lately, I have been spending time reflecting over the purpose of nonfiction writing. Dorothy Allison maybe said it best when she said once that we tell stories to survive, to expunge what we hold inside our chests and in the pit of our gut. It seems to me, at its most basic element, we tell our stories as a small part of the chronology of one’s self. But it goes beyond just trying to preserve essential parts of a history, beyond uncovering the aspects of a life deemed important. We are engaging in a conversation with our memory.

This is easy to neglect, pushing scenes and events as you remember them, but never bothering to examine why. More so, rarely do we slow down enough to have a dialogue with ourselves, exploring these poignant things as they come back to us. There’s got to be a reason we feel compelled to put them on the page, to weave them in our conversations.

And yet it is also about the discovery of these moments and thoughts. The preservation of observations and heightened emotions at a particular segment in time are important, as is the state of your life when you shared them. With the evolution of one’s perception changing so swiftly, it is hard to imagine things as you did in years past. There’s something powerful and important about it - that in our young adult lives we are able to pull stories from the threads of our skin, and these stories will grow and adapt as we mature and become less naive, more well-rounded in our world views. Capturing them at this particular moment as we waltz between epiphanies and conclusions, the steadfast belief in the impossibility of life and harrowing cynical reflections, is not only a crucial part in preserving who we are as individuals, but also the condition of human beings to fall into the eagerness of it all, the pain of youthful downfalls and the (un)educated contemplations that might seem foolish now, but meant a hell of a lot then. Isn’t that the beauty of it all?

With that being said, I don’t think anyone has the right to tell someone they shouldn’t write about a certain topic or element of life because they “still have a lot to learn.” I am horrified by the idea of what might happen if we all took such advice, if we only pursued chronicling our lives once we were far enough away from it to say with certainty that our beliefs would never change. Writing itself is a learning experience. Writing is also catharsis. But even more so, writing is about uncovering the parallels in our lives, the things we can’t stop circling throughout our minds, the underlying themes of our minds.

And I guess I just want to yell at everyone - from angst filled thirteen year olds to transitioning nineteen year olds to twenty five year olds growing older to the sixty year old man driving the bus and the forty year old cashier at the drugstore - to feel no shame or embarrassment in what you have to say about those big lofty things like love or loss or sadness, because they are all important and they are all worthwhile and they all have something to teach the reader. And I guess I want to just say that it is important to be young and dumb and have heart because that is the best time to feel things and I would be more than happy to read any of those stories because often those are the ones that shape the way we move into adulthood, that will shape us into our future selves, that will give us evidence for who we have been and who we are becoming.