Nothing Makes Sense Without Context.
If you wrote a story of just one hundred words, it could explain your entire life to someone. Each word would represent a single year.
Read only one word, and it tells you almost nothing. The word like and might, can appear a few times — standing in for those years when nothing remarkable seemed to happen, like the long pause of Covid, or the years when you quietly worked towards something bigger. A single year can’t communicate your full story.
The first word will never reveal how the last one will read. Your younger self had no idea how your life would unfold. And even if you wish you could go back and whisper advice, you couldn’t — because time travel doesn’t exist, and you wouldn’t have listened anyway. You have to keep reading your story, year after year, to understand yourself.
What if someone only reads a line from the middle of your story? That’s like knowing you for a handful of years. They see a snapshot, but not the beginning or the ending. A long-lost friend, though, can catch up quickly — they know enough of your earlier chapters to fill in the gaps.
And if someone only reads the final line? They won’t know how you got there unless you tell them the longer version — a retelling that might take far more than one hundred words. Memory, of course, edits as it pleases, especially if you never kept a diary.
In truth, only you will ever know your whole story. Yet even you won’t grasp its meaning until much later, when you can look back and see the arc of the tale.
That is why nothing makes sense without context. To understand your life, you must read your whole story.
