edited to add: I have no idea why this is marked as NSFW. I've tried to change that several times and it always changes back.

I have always loved stories. Fiction and non-fiction both, though non-fiction and the true twists and turns that can occur capture my heart more lately. My favorite part is always the progression. I love seeing what people have learned, if people have learned. Both internal learning, like realizing that something is more or less important to them than they originally thought, as well as the external learning, like learning more about another person involved in their conflict, or details that they were unaware of.

We only get this one life (as far as we know for sure! I do hope we get more), and reading other people's stories is a way to step from our own lives, for just a moment, and see another life from the inside out. I like this not because I dislike my own life (in recent times, I would say I'm living the best years of my life on a personal level, not counting this shitshow that is the US political system and the pandemic idiocy the greater inequalities of the world), but because there are just so many other ways to live, so many other ways to be molded by circumstance, and I am curious about many of them.

Things at my day job are currently quiet so I am posting quite regularly (once daily at the moment) while I can. I know that in a few months, things will be busier and I won't be able to post as much. But I want to post while I can, in part because finding the sub felt like coming home. It was the sub I always wanted and never thought of creating myself. I love reading stories so much, not just relationships stories, or legal stories, or wedding stories, but ALL of the stories and here, finally, is a place to do so. I am that person who often looks to see if a sub has an "update" tab, and even when it doesn't, will do a search for the word "update". I want to see where things started and where they have gone to. I imagine the other posters (especially the regulars) love reading stories as much as I do. I want to pay back that pleasure of seeing a new post is up, and going on an adventure.

Because I'm a giant data geek, I have bookmarked and made note of a huge number of stories on Reddit over the years. This sub gives me the excuse to go back and wade through that all, see where updates have been made, get a little bit more of the story (or maybe get a resolution on the story).

For me, Best of Redditor Updates isn't about happy stories only. It's not about finished stories only. And it's not about knowing the end of the story before I read it. It's about going on that journey and enjoying being in those moments. It's about seeing the start of a story and then the progression of a story. Maybe there will be an "ending" - lovely. And maybe there's not an ending - still lovely. If the ending doesn't wrap up in a neat little bow,I truly do not care. It's about the experience, the added information, the adding experience that does it for me (and it's "Best of Redditor Updates" not "Best of Redditor Finished Stories", for heaven's sake).

The mental states and biases are some of the most interesting parts to me, as I'm always aware that we're but seeing a thin sliver of someone's life in most cases. And we have no idea how clear or distorted this version of truth is. I think most of us have had the experience (be it through a Reddit post or IRL) of realizing that someone is an unreliable narrator. Once that happens, what happens to the story? What is real? What isn't real? And what does "real" mean? We think we know, right? Most of us hope that if we come together with other people, and recount how a situation occurred, we agree on the broad strokes of who said what, and how things progressed. We hope our realities mesh well with the others present, and when it doesn't, who is right? Who is wrong? Neither right nor wrong are necessarily absolutes in those occasions and my own life experience tells me most people get some things right and some things wrong, which is why I generally assume that regardless of the reliability of the narrator, that old saw is true: There's three sides to everything, yours, mine, and the truth.

After the OOP tells their story, as much as they tell, with however much detail they divulge, the conversation in the comments begets yet more stories. We see some of the biases that come out in commenters when a story scratches painfully against their own stories. Or the insights that someone else makes, as they piece together the posts & comments & pick out details that may add further illumination to the OOP's mental state or biases.

Sometimes I have a lot to say in the comments, especially if I have a similar experience to a story I've posted. Other times, a story inspires me to post because it's complicated and it brings up a LOT Of feelings and it's in reading the discourse that follows that I get more of a handle on how I actually feel. I really love that, posting something because it meant something to me, but I can't parse out what it is that I feel until someone else puts a name to it.

In the end, we're building structures of thought and belief and understand together, collaboratively. Sometimes they are towers, where most commenters agree in what the story means, who is truly the protagonist, who is the antagonist. And other times it's more like an explosion, with differing opinions and passionate disagreements strewn around like the aftermath of a battlefield.

Either way, I am delighted to read it and so grateful to have found a community where we can share these stories together.

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