​I realized I couldn’t tell my life story in a straight line, so I built it to work like an album instead of a book.

I’ve been working on a nonlinear digital memoir for a few months and I think I finally understand what it is.

It started as a private document, then turned into a website.

The structure ended up being the point. It works more like listening to music than reading a book — you don’t go start to finish, you drop in, follow something, come back later and it hits differently.

I realized I couldn’t write it linearly because I didn’t experience it that way. And by the time I understood what I was documenting, the act of documenting had already changed it.

So instead of forcing a clean narrative, I kept it iterative — something you can return to and re-understand over time.

Curious if anyone else working in nonlinear or digital forms has run into this — where the structure isn’t just a choice, it’s necessary.

I put the project online if anyone is curious to see how the structure actually works (link in comments).