In the 2021 biography of the late author Philip Roth, it was noted that, when his early work was published, Roth’s relatives often expressed outrage to the writer over his fictionalized use of what they recognized as family stories.
We don’t usually think of ourselves as narrators. We think of ourselves as parents, partners, coworkers, people just trying to get through the week without burning dinner or forgetting a password. Life is happening right now, in the swirl of errands and emails and text messages.
But the strange truth is: we only really understand our lives in hindsight. Not in the moment things are happening, but in the story we tell about what happened later.
That gap between “living” and “explaining” is where survival lives. Storytelling is how we bridge the two. It’s how we make sense of change and uncertainty, and how we quietly train ourselves—and each other—for whatever comes next.
The Story After the Story
Think about the last time something didn’t go as planned. Maybe it was annoyingly small, like circling a Trader Joe’s parking lot, hunting for that one open spot that never seems to exist.
In real time, that moment is mostly stress:
Is that car pulling out? No. Is that one? No. Why is that SUV taking two spots? Why is every other human in this city here right now?
But later, when you tell the story, something changes.
You don’t just say, “There were no spaces, it was horrible.” You add color and meaning. You talk about the car that looked like it was leaving but actually just adjusted two inches. You tell how your kid in the backseat declared, “We live here now,” because you’d been circling so long. You talk about the moment you finally gave up, parked three blocks away, and discovered a bakery you’d never noticed before.
By the time you’re telling it, you’re not just reliving a stressful errand. You’re turning it into a little survival manual about patience, absurdity, and the small surprises that appear when plans fall apart.
That’s what storytelling is: not just a replay, but a post-process. It’s a kind of emotional and cognitive digestion. We take what happened, and we distill it:
- What actually happened?
- How did it happen?
- Why did it happen?
- What changed because of it?
When we walk through those questions, we’re not only entertaining ourselves and others. We’re running a drill. We’re rehearsing how to navigate the next time things don’t go as planned—which, spoiler alert, is always.
The Driving Lesson
A bigger example: teaching my daughter to drive.
In the moment, it’s all forward motion and adrenaline. Her hands at ten and two, my foot pressing an imaginary brake on the passenger side. I’m hyper-aware of every other vehicle, every pedestrian, every stop sign. She’s trying to remember the rules: mirror, signal, blind spot. My job, supposedly, is to be calm and instructional.
But what’s also there, quietly sitting in the passenger seat with us, is my own history as a teenage driver. I remember being careless in ways I didn’t even recognize as careless at the time: blasting music, assuming nothing bad would happen because nothing bad had happened yet. I remember narrowly avoided accidents that didn’t feel like near-misses until years later, when I replayed them with an adult brain and a slower heartbeat.
In the raw, unprocessed moment of teaching my daughter, all of that is just a buzzing background frequency. It’s only when I tell the story later—maybe to a friend, or to my daughter herself—that it becomes something useful.
I might say:
“When I was your age, I took that curve too fast and almost ended up in a ditch. I didn’t think it was a big deal then—but looking back, I realize how close I came. So when I nag you about slowing down here, it’s not just ‘Dad being Dad.’ It’s me trying to hand you a shortcut I didn’t have.”
That’s not just nostalgia. That’s survival training.
By turning my past into a narrative, I extract the lesson I didn’t fully understand at the time. I give my daughter more than a rule (“Slow down on curves”); I give her a story: a cause, an effect, a feeling. Stories stick where instructions bounce off. Stories plant themselves in our nervous systems so that, in the moment we need them, they rise up as a quiet, guiding voice.
Stories as Hand-Me-Down Tools
We think of survival skills as things like knowing how to build a fire or change a tire. But most of the time, what we’re really trying to survive is being human:
- How do I navigate loss?
- How do I handle failure?
- How do I love people who are changing, when I’m changing too?
- How do I carry joy and fear at the same time?
There’s no manual for that. There’s just the messy raw footage of life—and then there are stories.
When someone tells you about the worst year of their life and how they got through it, you’re not just being “entertained.” You are being equipped. They’re giving you a map of how they walked out of the dark. You may never walk the exact same path, but you’ll remember that it can be walked.
When a friend tells you about the job they didn’t get, and how it led to the one that actually fit them, you are hearing more than a plot twist. You’re learning: rejection is not the same as destruction. That’s survival training for the next time your own inbox delivers bad news.
Even the light stories—the parking lot saga, the awkward first date, the family vacation gone sideways—are survival drills in disguise. They say:
- You will feel out of control sometimes.
- It will be uncomfortable.
- You will get through it.
- And someday, this too will shrink down into a story you can hold, turn over, and maybe even laugh about.
From “What Happened” to “What It Means”
Things happen all the time by accident, without much intention. A conversation goes sideways. An opportunity appears because you answered the wrong email. A relationship ends because one person changes faster than the other.
If we never examined those moments, they would just be noise. But the act of storytelling forces a kind of scrutiny and perspective. We decide which details matter. We choose where the story starts and where it ends. We pick out the turning point: This is where I realized…
In doing that, we move from “Here’s what happened” to “Here’s what it meant. Here’s what I learned. Here’s what I carry now.”
That shift is what keeps us from being just passengers in our own lives. It’s how we become authors, even if the page is just a conversation, a journal entry or a story told across a table after dinner.
Survival, Shared
The beautiful side effect is that our survival training isn’t private. Every time we tell a story, we’re running drills for each other.
We give language to emotions someone else hasn’t named yet. We model the possibility of getting it wrong and still moving forward. We admit that we were scared, petty, wrong, hopeful, stubborn, changed. And by doing that, we quietly say to whoever’s listening:
“You’re not the only one. Here’s how I made it through. Maybe this will help you, too.”
That’s why storytelling resonates far beyond the stage or the page. It’s not just performance. It’s not just content. It’s a shared, ongoing, human training program in how to be alive.
We live in the now. That’s unavoidable. But we endure—together—through the stories we tell afterward.
