Why I Started Writing My Memories

On April 14, 2026, I started working on this website.

At first, I didn't think too much about writing down my memories. I had already taken thousands of photos over the years. Most of them were simply sitting on my phone, computer, or old storage drives. I would occasionally look through them, remember where I had been, and then close the folder again.

For years, that was how it went.

I often spent my weekends outside. Sometimes I went to the beach, sometimes into the mountains, and sometimes just traveled somewhere nearby for a change of scenery. At the time, these were ordinary weekends. I never thought they would become something worth writing about.

But when I look at some of those photos now, I realize that many of them were taken years ago.

Some places have changed. Some people have changed. And some of the moments in those photographs can never happen again.

That is probably the main reason I decided to start writing my memories.

I used to have very little time for this kind of thing. For many years, I was simply another person working in a company, spending most of my time writing code, dealing with work, and trying to keep up with everyday life. There was always something more urgent to do. Writing down an old memory never seemed important enough.

So the photos accumulated, while the memories stayed in my head.

Now that I have more time, I have started to look back at them differently.

Over the years, I have experienced too many changes, accidents, separations, and unexpected events. I have seen people leave, relationships change, and lives take completely different directions. I also witnessed the difficult years of the pandemic and the misfortune that happened to some of my former colleagues.

Sometimes I think back to the years I spent in the Philippines, and to many other places and periods of my life.

Those things may seem like nothing more than passing moments now. Life keeps moving forward, whether we are ready for it or not.

But people are not made of stone. How can we live through so many things and feel nothing?

Life has to move forward, of course. But I don't think that means we should never look back.

If you never look back at your own life, you may miss some of the most interesting parts of it.

After all, we are all going to die someday. It might sound a little blunt to say it that way, but it is simply true. And none of us knows exactly when that day will come.

When that time arrives, perhaps we won't even have another chance to look through our old photos or remember the ordinary weekends we once thought were nothing special.

That would be a shame.

So I decided to start writing.

Not because I want to live in the past, and not because I think everything was better before.

I simply want to keep some of these moments before they disappear.

The photographs are still there.

The memories are still there.

And perhaps, if I write them down, they can become something more than old files sitting quietly on a hard drive.