How an Innocent Question Sparked a Movement

My personal mission is to help people tell their stories. I’m pretty obsessed with it, but it all started with one of those small moments you almost overlook. A question my son asked from the backseat of the car.

“Mommy, what did I look like when I was a baby?”

He was strapped into his booster seat, still small enough that the shoulder belt still didn’t sit quite right. We were driving home from school and, like most mothers, I immediately launched into a dramatic retelling of his baby years. I told him about his cheeks, which were so round and kissable they almost didn’t seem real. I told him how obsessed I was with him then and how much I enjoy learning more and more about him every day. I promised him that when we got home, I would pull up some baby photos so he could see for himself.

Then I got home and realized I couldn’t find them.

By that point, five years and several phones, laptops, cloud providers, external hard drives, and half-hearted organizing attempts had come and gone. Somewhere along the way, the photos had disappeared into the digital abyss we all quietly pretend is under control.

What should have been a sweet moment between mother and son turned into a slight panic.

Meanwhile, my son had moved on in the span of about four minutes and was now fully committed to Legos. He left me to my own devices. Literally.

I remember scrolling through folders thinking, how is this possible? How can we document our lives so thoroughly and yet feel so disconnected from it all?

I had every intention of preserving those years. I think most parents do. But parenting has a way of reducing life to triage. You are simultaneously trying to survive the day and appreciate how fleeting it all is. The baby book starts with beautiful ambition and slowly migrates to the bottom of a pile somewhere near the unopened mail and forgotten permission slips.

The days are long. The years are short. Everyone says this because it turns out to be horrifyingly true.

Eventually, I found the photos buried on a random hard drive. But by then, something larger had clicked into place for me.

I realized we were saving plenty. We were simply drowning in it all.

The stories that define our lives are being buried beneath the sheer volume of our digital clutter. Every year, we compound this problem by creating more photos, more videos, more messages, more fragments of ourselves scattered across platforms and devices with almost no system designed to help us make sense of any of it.

I started wondering what exactly we were planning to hand down to our children. Would it be a meaningful story about who we were, how we lived, what mattered to us, and how deeply we loved them?

Or would it be passwords to several cloud storage accounts and a drawer full of (gasp!) unlabeled hard drives?

Now, I tend to become obsessive when a question gets lodged in my brain. Once I start pulling on a thread, I have a hard time letting go without knowing what I’m unraveling. So, I started researching. That research eventually led me to The Photo Managers, an organization dedicated to helping people organize their memories and preserve their stories. I became certified as a professional photo organizer, got my own digital house in order, and then started helping families do the same.

Once you spend enough time inside other people’s memories, certain realities become impossible to ignore.

First, our digital lives are expanding faster than we can meaningfully manage them. Without better systems, we risk losing not only individual memories in the present but family history across generations.

Second, legacy no longer lives neatly inside photo albums. Our stories are now digital; they exist across photos, videos, voice notes, texts, calendars, social posts, documents, and countless digital traces we leave behind every day.

And third, storage is not the same as storytelling.

That last realization stayed with me the longest because the question I heard over and over again from families was never really about organization. It was about meaning, and it went something like this: 

“How do I hand all of this down to my kids in a way that actually matters?”

Look, I am a professional organizer. I will always tell you to back everything up. Please keep paying for cloud storage. But I will also tell you something slightly uncomfortable: passive storage has become a big part of the problem.

Our clouds have become the soft landing where memories go to die.

We save everything because saving feels responsible. Saving feels safe. Saving creates the comforting illusion that if something is stored away, it will somehow remain emotionally accessible forever.

This is a lie because memory does not work that way.

Our photos sit separated from the text messages that explain them. Our calendars sit disconnected from the milestones they represent. Voice notes, documents, social posts, videos, and conversations all live inside separate applications, preserved but fragmented.

Each precious piece exists, but the story is trapped inside, and story is how we find the meaning.

Around that same time, AI was beginning to evolve in ways that suddenly made this feel solvable. And I realized we were standing at the intersection of three things happening simultaneously: overwhelming digital clutter, a growing emotional disconnection from our own lives, and technology finally capable of helping us reconstruct meaning hiding in the chaos.

That was the moment my mission started to take shape, and when I dreamed up the vision of Mae.

The vision is simple in theory and incredibly ambitious in practice: create tools that help families transform their digital lives into a meaningful legacy. Systems that pull together the content people are already creating and help surface the context, relationships, stories, and emotional threads that actually matter.

I often think about what my own children will someday inherit from me. Not financially, but emotionally. What evidence of a life will remain? What will help them understand who I was, once their own memories of me begin to fade around the edges? What will help generations beyond them feel that connection, too?

A camera captures moments, and we humans assign meaning to them. Somewhere along this digital pathway, we stopped doing the second part well.

This is what I obsess over now because, my friends, Memory Matters.

About Nichole Healy
Nichole is the Founder and CEO of Mae, a company building the infrastructure for how families curate, experience, and pass down their digital lives. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Instagram.