Your Stories Matter Month

Here at History Chip, we are excited to announce that at History Chip, December is International Your Stories Matter Month! And we mean everyone’s stories matter. A whole month dedicated to your stories. That is exciting. It’s like a whole month of sitting around a campfire, a family reunion or a holiday meal.  And you might think, so what? Stories about the time Uncle Jimmy drove the tractor into the lake. Who cares? The time the school shut down because someone, a future friend’s future father put a skunk in the furnace room, causing the entire school to smell like a skunk! Do stories about being a conductor on a train, or a bus really matter? The way that your grandfather would walk an hour just to offer his condolences on the death of a loved one and turn back to return home, having completed the important task of offering comfort. Of course these stories matter. This is what the world is made of. This is how we live. This is the fabric of our lives. Our personal stories explain who we are and how we function so much more powerfully and beautifully than the fact that so and so won an election. Sharing stories present what life is like for most of the world’s people.

Knowing how we celebrate deaths and births and holidays is like filling in the background pieces on a puzzle. All that background sets the stage for the “big” aspects of that puzzle - the wars, disasters, regime changes. Without the background, we have no context for the rest of the picture. Our stories are what we need to fill in the background of our world’s puzzle. We all experience so much in our many years on this planet. We see everyday life. We see startling events. We live through difficult times. We experience intense joy as well as heartache. There is so much that we see. And the surprising thing is that even when we see the same things that our neighbor sees, we will remember them differently.

At an accident scene, the police will interview all the witnesses. This gives the best opportunity for piecing together the truth of what happened. No one catches everything at the scene so we need lots of people telling the story. Or, if you are at the scene of a bank robbery and you were the only one of 20 or so other people who were there who saw the license plate of the getaway car, your story is really important. Maybe the other people saw the faces of the bank robbers, or the color or make and model of that getaway car. Or maybe one of the witnesses saw the tattoo of Winnie The Pooh on the really tall bank robber. Maybe someone heard a robber speak with a British accent. Or someone else noticed that one of the robbers had white hair. With all of those stories, we get a good picture of who these people are. These are little details. But all the little details together put together a very full puzzle with lots of great details. And, the police don’t care if you are a great storyteller. They just care that you can relate what you remember. At History Chip, don’t get me wrong, we love a great story but more importantly, we want to know what you remember.

History Chip is a story sharing website where you write your stories online. There are other online story telling websites but none of them does what History Chip does. History Chip turns your true stories into a rich, glorious, and searchable archive of the truth of our world. When you share your story with History Chip you help to prove that Everyone’s Stories Matter.

Reading this story, “Let Go To Listen”, is such a great story about life and demonstrates so clearly the ways that all of our stories together complete the majestic panorama of our world.

We hope you will participate in the wonderful Storytelling Month by adding your own stories. Your stories are wonderful and they matter!