Stories are perhaps the most important thing we can contribute to others in our short life on planet Earth.
Mind you, I am not saying that stories are the most important things in OUR lives, because they are not. The most important things in OUR lives are experiences, which are moment-by-moment things. The best we can do with our own experiences is to tell stories about them, which will never convey the actual living of them. All we can do is to try to give others the sense of those experiences to the best of our abilities. No matter how skilled we may be as writers, though, we can NEVER communicate well enough for others to actually have the genuine sense of our genuine experiences. Others can never feel the exact emotions and bodily sensations we had when we experienced something, no matter how well we may be able to write. That stuff is OURS to keep and know and it will always be ours, because no one else is like us and no one else will ever be like me, or you, or you.
We humans each have lots of stories, but it is not significant that we have them, but it is important about what stories we choose to tell and when we tell them and to whom we tell them.
Consider what we all have as humans when you take away all of our "stuff" (i.e. posessions). All we have left is what we have in our craniums (which we can use in the future when we are alive) AND our stories. Nothing else makes us unique. When we die, the only precious thing that dies with us is our stories. No one else has our stories. They are OURS and ours alone. They belong to us and they are our legacy that dies when our bodies die.
Every story is a different story. But also every story is important. Significant. Important in its own way and given we now have the Internet, a story that can be told by all who care to do it. Someone, somewhere will be touched by EVERY story that is told if people would just tell it.
Stories that are told can influence people and can change regimes and even history.
I made a stab at telling mine, but enemies trashed me personally because of it. But that doesn't mean you cannot tell yours. YOU can change things by telling yours.
After all is said and done, and when we die, our stories die with us and can never be retold unless we told them to someone while we were alive, and that is all we have left in life to share that is unique for us anyway, unless you consider material possessions to mean anything worthwhile.
Lest you think I am only talking about stories like "Boy, did that Watchtower Society screw up MY life!", I'm not. That's only ONE story in our lives. We all have LOTS more stories other than THAT boring story.
They need to be shared if nothing else for the cathartic reason it heals us and it is, after all, our only genuine legacy in our short visit to planet Earth.
Res ipsa loquitur.
Farkel