Preserve My Legacy
A journal
Twelve pages of questions worth answering about your own life. There is no order to follow and no wrong length.
Vividly1 of 12
A journal
Twelve pages of questions worth answering about your own life. There is no order to follow and no wrong length.
Before you start
A life doesn’t arrive as a story. It arrives as a few thousand ordinary days, and the shape of it usually becomes clear to somebody else, later, and only in pieces.
These are questions worth answering. Not a biography — nobody finishes one of those. Answer whichever ones catch you, in any order, over as long as it takes. Skip the rest without guilt; a skipped question tells its own story.
Write the specific thing, not the summary. Not “we didn’t have much money” but what was actually for dinner on a Thursday. Not “he was a hard worker” but what time he left and what he carried. Detail is what makes a page sound like a person instead of a description of one.
Don’t tidy as you go. The digression, the argument you had about it afterwards, the part where you lost your thread — that is usually the part people read twice.
If a question opens something you would rather not put on paper, leave it. Answering is not the point. Being honest in the parts you do answer is.
Section one
Start with the rooms. The people come with them.
Describe the room you spent the most time in before you were ten. Where were the windows? What was underfoot? What sat out on a surface and never got put away?
Who ran the household in practice, whatever the arrangement looked like from outside?
What did your family have strong opinions about that other families didn’t seem to think about at all?
Section two
Paid or not, and including the work nobody put a title on.
What was the first thing you were ever paid to do, and what did you do with the money?
Walk through an ordinary day at the work you did longest. Not a memorable day. A Tuesday. What time did it start, and what did your hands do?
What were you good at that never appeared in a job title?
Section three
Describe them by what they did, not by what they were like. It works better.
Who taught you something you still use? Did they mean to teach it?
Describe someone you loved by what they did with their hands.
Who have you lost touch with, and what would you ask them if they walked in now?
Section four
Most of them only look like turning points afterwards.
Write about a decision you made quickly that changed a great deal.
What did you nearly do instead, and how close did it come?
Describe a time you changed your mind about something that mattered.
Section five
Not the tidy version. The one you actually act on.
What do you think people get wrong about how to live?
What advice have you given that turned out to be right, and what turned out to work only once?
Was there something you were raised to believe that you eventually had to put down?
Section six
Nobody thinks to record these, and they are the first thing to go.
What did a weekday look like during the busiest year of your life?
What did you cook so often you stopped needing to think about it? Write it out as you actually make it, quantities and all.
What sound do you associate with home? Not a word — a sound.
Section seven
Nobody has to read this page. Write it anyway and decide afterwards.
What are you proud of that you’ve never mentioned, because saying it out loud would sound like boasting?
Is there an apology you never made? You can draft it here first.
What do you know about your family that nobody has ever thought to ask you?
Section eight
Some of them you’ll meet. Some of them you won’t, and they’ll be curious anyway.
If somebody two generations down got one page about you, what should be on it?
Describe yourself at your best. Then describe yourself on an average Wednesday.
What should they not worry about, that you spent years worrying about?
Section nine
The best material usually arrives unprompted, halfway through answering something else, and it rarely fits the question that produced it. This page is for that. Names you want written down, a story that has been waiting, the thing you thought of in the car.
The last page
A page holds what was said. It doesn’t hold how it was said.
The pause before the difficult part. The way somebody’s voice drops when they mention their mother. The accent that only comes back when the story is about home. The laugh in the middle of a sentence that changes what the sentence meant.
None of that survives the trip onto paper. That isn’t a failure of this journal — it’s simply what writing is.
So: whatever you do with these pages, don’t leave them in a drawer nobody opens. Tell one person they exist and where they are. Read a page aloud to somebody who is in the room. That part matters more than finishing.
Preserve My Legacy is published by Vividly, which records life stories by phone with a trained human interviewer. Whether or not you ever use that, these questions are yours to keep and to copy. — vividly.family