how to save a life

why stories are always worth it

When I was a kid, I wanted badly for reasons I’m still not sure I understand to box my life into one hard fast purpose. To engrave it into stone and be able to say that when I reach this goal, that says my life has meaning.

I don’t know if I did it for myself or not. I can’t remember if people around me were saying that I needed to do it, or if I decided of my own accord that giving myself one task, one mission, would make it all worth it. Looking back at the ways it showed itself, I think now that it’s a little bit of both — I don’t think I came up with the idea organically, but I know damn well I made it my own and let it seep into my own blood.

At the time, the one I landed on seemed simple: to save someone’s life.

Because I was writing then, too.

And my books and stories and my daydreams themselves inevitably fell under the same need for meaning that my entire life did. And it gave me something pretty damn tangible, too. At the time I was just a kid, and the extent of my medical knowledge was from outdated books, gauze and broken ribs. I chose to imagine anything was possible, and it was, but I wasn’t exactly being handed opportunities to save someone’s life on a daily basis. My stories, though, that was something.

Of course, I’ve since learned firsthand that you can chase all the medical training in the world and even that doesn’t guarantee you’ll be handed the chance to save someone’s life. EMT and paramedic and critical care, none of it guarantees you shit, and yet we stay chasing, because something in the chase makes life make sense.

The chase made my stories make sense, too.

Because you know what else doesn’t guarantee you’ll save a life? Making all the plans for the future and begging someone to stay and telling them all the things they haven’t gotten to do with you yet and calling 911 and screaming to the sky.

But something in my stories gave me the illusion of control.

And that little bit of control I clawed from them, that purpose I assigned everything, it was a little bit of a traitor, too.

For the most part, I did write the stories I needed to hear, and I wrote what was in my soul, but I let shit change, and I didn’t always say exactly what I knew even then needed to be said. Because it was all right to not quite tell the story I knew needed to be told, if it increased its chances of reaching someone. Of saving someone’s life.

Somewhere along the way, the lines blurred between writing because I had a story to tell and writing because I had to save the world.

And you can’t do that. Stories can’t do that. One person can’t do that.

So whatever healing I thought I could be guaranteed through them, by them doing the impossible, that never happened.

In the end, though, I think part of me did find what I was looking for.

I still think I have to save the world most of the time.

But it’s not why I write.

It’s never been why I really write, even when I tried to make it be.

When I was just a little kid, four, five, six years old, I wrote stories on sheets of paper stapled together at the corners because they were in my head and I didn’t want to forget them, the purest form of creativity, not even a thought that the world out there would require anything from them.

The way I still want to tell stories now.

And my stories now, in ways I never expected, in ways I couldn’t have dreamed, have done more to heal a part of my soul than any of the expectations I tied into those first books, just by existing. Just by being written.

I still don’t like to hear it, and neither do the characters I write now, for obvious reasons, but nobody’s and nothing’s worth is determined by how much other people find them useful.

Especially not stories.

Stories, those are all yours.

If someone else finds some comfort, some salvation, some reason to keep going, within in, then thank God. But that’s not what makes a story worth it. That’s not what makes it worth writing, worth telling. If not another soul ever knows why it matters to you, then who gives a shit? It’s your story, not theirs. It matters to you for a reason.

It matters to this one, right?

Stories aren’t for saving the world. They’re for saving you.

And no one can tell you that they’re not doing enough if they’re saving you.