We often think of inheritance as financial or material. But the deeper legacies we carry can’t be counted or contained. They live in the way we make meaning: what we believe is possible in love, what we’ve learned to fear in loss, and who we’ve been told we’re allowed to become. These legacies are passed down not only through money or objects, but through language and silence, through memory and myth.
Storytelling is not just remembering—it’s transmission. It’s how identity gets carried forward. Stories shape how future generations understand themselves, struggle, and belonging. The ones we inherit tell us what matters. The ones we tell become the architecture of who we are.
In narrative therapy, we say people are not problems to be solved, but stories waiting to be heard. I’d take it further: we are stories waiting to be witnessed. To put language to lived experience is to take authorship of it. Sometimes that means reworking the story we were handed. Sometimes it means tugging at the loose thread of a single memory until it unravels into something truer. And sometimes, it’s simply writing it down or saying it aloud—so we can finally see ourselves reflected back.
Telling the truth of your life—your heartbreaks, choices, joys, and regrets—isn’t indulgent. It’s medicine. Not only for you, but for those who will one day wonder if they’re the only ones who’ve felt this way.
And here’s the paradox: you don’t need to be wise or healed or certain to offer this gift. You don’t need a tidy moral to land on. It’s your unfinishedness that makes your stories sacred. When we let ourselves be seen in the mess of becoming, we invite others to do the same. We stop performing certainty, and we start practicing connection.
Your stories don’t need to be neat. They need to be yours. They need to carry the fingerprints of your lived experience—your questions, your contradictions, your truth.
In a culture obsessed with legacy as productivity, storytelling reminds us that presence is the most meaningful thing we can leave behind. Your voice. Your memory. Your humanity.
So write the letter. Record the voice note. Share the moment. Tell the story of your life while you’re still here to shape it.
Because someone you love will one day look to your story to remember who they are.
