Give me your life story in six words.

And don’t say, “It’s too long of a story.”

Smith Magazine (smithmag.net) is home of the six-word memoir. It’s like a more direct version of PostSecret that anyone can post and read on the Web. Some are hilarious (“Got fired as the human cannonball”), some are heartbreaking (“I’m gay, with a homophobic mother”) and some I wish would be turned into 600-page memoirs (“Hitchhiked to delivery room: blizzard boy!”).

Taken by this idea of a six-word memoir, I decided to try my own hand. Whittling 20 years down to six words felt like drinking a gallon of milk in an hour, so I thought taking it hour-by-hour a smoother route.

Was I right? Not at all.

As I laid in bed with a pen and paper, skimming through the few memories I had of every hour, I realized I simply hadn’t been paying attention. And I’m not just talking about spacing out in lecture; I mean really not paying attention — to the conversations I had, the songs pumping through my headphones or the faces I mindlessly waved to on the street.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I don’t care about any of those details. I just never thought about them for more than a few seconds, and moreover never considered them relevant to my memoir-in-the-making.

But I gave it another shot the next day, my focus zoomed in on every little brushstroke of every hour, and it turned out there wasn’t enough paper to accommodate all my mini-memoirs. “Wet sidewalks make my nose smile.” “Misspelled professor’s name for two years.” “Didn’t brush hair. Compliments flood. Weirdos.” I could go on for hours, about the hours, and that’s just what I did.

So maybe a six-word memoir of your life seems a little daunting. I don’t blame you. But don’t be so afraid of the idea that you miss all the tiny details of your days like I did. Once you start paying attention, you’ll realize you can’t have a memoir without those subtleties.

In fact, paying attention is crucial not just for your memory. You can’t understand your world and the people in it without a wide lens. Let’s be honest, you don’t want to read my full-length memoir, and I probably wouldn’t be all that taken by yours — not yet, anyway.

But if you can sum up your lunch, your day, your semester or your year in six words, you’ve got something cool, and chances are, I’ll nod when I read it. And the person down the hall and the guy who brews your coffee will sigh, along with masses of other strangers, as they say to themselves, “Damn. Been there.”

When we’re dodging fastballs, finding ourselves in fender-benders, getting our hearts spit on and dropping the dozens of plates we’re juggling, the closest button to reach for is the one that says, “Nobody gets me.” We keep life’s weirdness a secret and master our poker faces, and when someone calls B.S., we swat them away and tell them it’s too long of a story.

Well, we can take that excuse off our list, just like we can finally admit that our stories aren’t any more bizarre than the next person’s.

As you scan other six-word memoirs and create your own, you’ll stumble across a weird paradox: Our stories are uniquely universal. And those stories are almost always a little offbeat, which is exactly what makes a memoir worth reading — even if it’s only six words long.