I think fiction might be the most important thing humans have ever invented and I am including fire and antibiotics in that statement.

That’s probably an exaggeration. It’s definitely an exaggeration. But I believe it more than I should and I’m not going to walk it back.

Here’s what I mean. There are things that happen to us — grief, failure, heartbreak, the slow grinding realization that the life you thought you were building isn’t the one you’re actually living — that are almost impossible to process head-on. You can’t just sit with the feeling and think your way through it. Your brain won’t let you. It’ll deflect, distract, numb, scroll, do anything to avoid looking directly at the thing. We’re very good at not dealing with stuff.

But if someone else is going through it? If a character in a book or a movie is standing in the wreckage of the thing you’re afraid to name? You can watch them. You can walk through it with them. And somewhere in the process of caring about how this fictional person handles their version of the hard thing, you start figuring out how you want to handle yours.

It doesn’t even have to be the same situation. That’s the part people get wrong. They think fiction only helps when it mirrors your exact experience — like you need to find a book about a guy with a bad ankle who lives in Northern Colorado and has too many hobbies. You don’t. You just need a character who is processing something hard, and your brain will do the rest. It’ll find the parallels. It’ll map their journey onto yours whether you ask it to or not.

The movie Chef did this for me. There’s a scene — well, there’s a whole arc — where Jon Favreau’s character is working for a boss who is slowly crushing everything he loves about cooking. He’s making safe food for a safe restaurant and he’s dying inside. And then he snaps. He freaks out publicly, loses the job, and eventually finds his way to a food truck where he falls back in love with the thing he was always supposed to be doing.

When I watched that movie I was going through my own version of that story. I was at my last “real” job, the one that was eating me alive, and I hadn’t yet stumbled into what I do now. Watching someone else blow up their safe miserable thing and find something that actually made them happy — it didn’t fix my situation. But it let me see it. It gave me a shape for what I was feeling that I couldn’t find on my own. Someone else’s story gave me permission to want something different.

That’s what fiction does. It gives you permission.

And it works in the other direction too. Writing fiction processes things just as powerfully as reading it, maybe more. I’ve been working on a story called The Correspondent for a long time. A long time. It deals with death and hospice and grief, and I started writing it while I was working in hospice. Every day I was surrounded by people at the end of their lives and the families trying to figure out how to exist in the aftermath, and I didn’t know what to do with all of that. I couldn’t just sit with it. It was too big.

So I gave it to characters. I wrote passages about death and grief and loss and I let fictional people carry the weight of it for a while. And in the process of figuring out how they would feel and what they would say and how they would survive it, I started figuring out my own answers. Writing those scenes didn’t make the grief smaller. But it made it something I could hold. It gave it edges and shape instead of just being this massive shapeless thing sitting on my chest.

That’s why I think telling stories matters. Not because stories are entertaining — though they are — and not because they make us smarter or more empathetic — though they probably do that too. Stories matter because they give us a safe place to feel the things we’re afraid to feel on our own. Someone else’s fictional heartbreak gives you a dress rehearsal for your real one. Someone else’s fictional triumph gives you a map for your own.

Read fiction. Write fiction. Tell stories around a campfire or in a text message or in a terrible first draft that nobody will ever see. It doesn’t matter if it’s good. It matters that you’re letting yourself travel through something hard alongside a character who isn’t you but also kind of is.

That’s the whole trick. It’s not you. Until it is.