Stories
It is fascinating how humanity bonds over stories — the tales of trauma, love, loss, life, and the tumult that surrounds them. Lifeless definitions of characters who exist only in someone’s mind possess immense power over the reader’s psyche, such that they become part of their life. Everyone desires to be seen, to have someone who knows everything about them and yet chooses to stay and learn more. I realised very young that my life is not so interesting for someone to sit and listen to; who I am and who I was, the routines and the mundane, have always shaped my days, and frankly, I don’t seem to mind. My contribution to others’ lives thus boils down to either entertainment or results. Adulthood hits you with the realisation that there will always be someone more intelligent than you, more knowledgeable, or simply more efficient at delivering results. For those who get this realisation early, it feels more like a pat than a slap; for someone who receives it later in life, it hits like a heavyweight boxer’s knockout punch. I am pretty grateful to have had this realisation in adolescence rather than adulthood, because now I see the sheer arrogance of those who have yet to experience it, and I feel pity — for I know what life has in store for them — and envy, for their blissful ignorance, emphasis on blissful. Stories, in the form of movies, songs, poems, paintings, and myths, can shatter the drunken stupor of the arrogant and ignorant. Still, kudos to the human mind’s ingenuity. In my personal experience, I have observed that the more ignorant someone is of their own shortcomings, the less likely they are to learn the philosophical lessons of these art forms, left on the sidelines to be merely side characters in someone else’s story. The instinct to run away is so strong that, like ostriches, they would rather run or, in desperate cases, bury their heads in the sand in the face of a hyena hungry for ages. Stories, however, never quite lose their shine; instead, these people tend to fixate on their aesthetics — the performance — on “what it would mean to the world if they reveal this aspect of their personality”. While not necessarily a bad thing in itself, in my eyes it still makes them a side character who is merely two-dimensional, when coupled with arrogance, it can evoke the feeling of talking to a ten-year-old on KBC, asking the host to lock the answer without even knowing the options. The delusions of grandeur then grow, and a saviour complex often follows.
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I am not here to diagnose the people I dislike, though. I am here to write about how we, as humans, possess this superpower to use words and create beings, stories so powerful that closing a book, finishing a series, leaving a theatre, or closing a museum can feel like attending a funeral of a beloved friend. Stories, songs, books, and movies then occupy space in one’s mind and come to define: a particularly bittersweet at worst, excellent at best, time in one’s life. Life throws its nasty curveballs — when you read about a character cutting themselves and find solace in how it resonates with a difficult time in your own life; or when you see love at first sight metaphorically signified by imaginary violin players in the background of a movie, and you feel the most seen. Perhaps this is what distinguishes the more melodramatic from the mundane. Everyone has their own problems and has developed coping mechanisms to deal with them. It is when I see someone choosing to use stories as their refuge that I fall in love. Because they dare to get up and learn — unlike the lazy who simply become resentful. Courage to face one’s shortcomings, empathy to feel for imaginary people connected to us through words and love — such that the simple end of a story fills the air with melancholy — makes us human. In the short life I have lived, I have been troubled, though infrequently, by the question of who I am and why I am here. The more I read, watch, and listen, I realise that this question won’t matter if I can, just once, create a character that is beloved in a story that endures, with someone I will never meet, who doesn’t know my name and I won’t know theirs. Sometimes, I think even that won’t matter — if no one reads my stories, poems, or sees the half-baked things I draw — since I also believe there is a universe where all the stories and characters that humanity has created in this universe are real and living their lives as we write them, while we live ours as writers in their universe — writing us — an cosmic entanglement that gives our lives meaning, and the characters a little life; a life that, in a way, does imitate art.
