22. Stories of Our Lives

April 3rd 2020, Friday

Dear Blog,

It really is funny how reading a book can have the potential to change your life, at least your perspective to it.

In Chuck’s new book, as mentioned in the previous blog post, many stories still haunt me. I used to see stories as a way of self-expression. He said classics are classics because they build a community with them. They are ways to bind ourselves with one another, a collective experience that gives us permission to share our own stories. He also inspired me to go to parties more often, to hear others’ stories rather than living in my own misery. I am starting to understand why creating for fiction is becoming a drag for me, mostly because I do not know what feels real. But when listening to people’s stories that actually happened, they contain in themselves a sense of reality that is both ephemeral and eternal, makes you question what you think you know about the world. Rules are invented. We are mostly living in the rules of our own creations.

I have to admit that even as an introvert, isolation is getting harder and harder. People need people.

This is another reason to bother collecting stories. Because our existence is a constant flow of the impossible, the implausible, the coincidental. And what we see on television and in films must always be diluted to make it “believable.” We are trained to live in constant denial of the miraculous. And it’s only by telling our stories that we get any sense of how extraordinary human existence actually can be.

— Chuck Palahniuk