Why Tell a Story?

My whole life, I’ve viewed everything in the context of a story.

Lately, my days have been strangely empty. Long stretches of time spent doing almost nothing. I should enjoy the rest, but instead it unsettles me. With all this free time, I could have learned piano, cleaned up the neighborhood, and planted a tree. Instead, I spent most of it writing. Writing for myself, writing for other people, writing things I’ll probably never show anyone.

Writing opens up a billion possibilities. Not just for my own life, but for lives beyond my own. I love that about it. I also find it overwhelming.

But yes, I am a writer. I always have been.

Eugene Ionesco once said, “For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” That feels painfully true to me. Even when I’m not writing, I’m narrating. Replaying conversations. Imagining meanings. Trying to understand why certain people enter my life exactly when they do.

I move through the world as if every encounter matters.

Sometimes that mindset makes me feel strangely powerless, like the major events of my life have already been written somewhere ahead of me. I walk into situations wondering not “What will happen?” but “What is this trying to say?” As if my life were less of a straight line and more of a novel unfolding one chapter at a time.

Because of that, I struggle to see anyone as unimportant. Even temporary people feel significant. Even painful experiences feel like they arrived with a purpose I may not understand until much later.

Maybe that’s why I feel things so deeply. Other people’s sadness reaches me too easily. I feel genuine grief over strangers, over history, over the sheer amount of suffering human beings are capable of inflicting on one another. The history of the world is brutal. Cruelty exists on scales so large it almost becomes impossible to comprehend.

And still, despite all of that, I believe in God.

Not always in the traditional sense. Not in the perfectly organized, every-Sunday-morning kind of way. More in the sense that I feel there must be some greater intention woven through nature, through people, through the strange timing of our lives. Some kind of energy, placed within us by our creator, connecting us all.

But if there is meaning, then what do we do with pain?

I sometimes try to imagine a world without it. A perfect world where no one aches for anything, where every need is met, where violence doesn’t exist, where everyone is endlessly content. It sounds beautiful in theory. But every time I picture it, something feels missing.

Art.

Not because suffering is good, but because suffering makes us reach for one another. It forces us to translate what hurts into something another person can recognize. Music, films, paintings, poetry, stories, and so much of it begins with someone trying to make sense of being human.

Even happiness becomes art because we know it won’t last forever.

Maybe that’s why pain feels so universal. Happiness looks different on everybody, but grief has a language almost everyone understands. Art becomes the place where those experiences meet.

A reminder that none of us are carrying the weight of being alive entirely alone.