Photo by Joshua Earle.
Stories Matter: They Provide Escape by Sunshine Sandra Sablan.
Why do stories matter? Stories from all genres have a purpose when told. If it was a story about the prodigal son, their purpose could be to tell them that it’s okay to make mistakes, or it could be about loss and redemption. The point is, there is a purpose. When telling these stories they also have an impact on the person. You can always have different interpretations of the stories you hear, and that’s okay.
In my case, I use stories as an escape. An escape from the world, when life is hard and I can’t catch a break, I dive into a new book and pretend that the life around me isn’t reality anymore and the life in the book is what’s real. Besides music, books are what I turn to; music also has its own stories to tell but that’s a different essay. These stories can give you the life you want or wish you had even if it’s just for a brief moment in time. Being so absorbed in the book or a story in general, I feel as if I’m in a completely different world and the one around me, slowly fades. Unfortunately, as beautiful as this escape is, it is not permanent.
Stories have the power to influence you and inspire you in ways you wouldn’t have imagined. They can help us cope with whatever it is you may be going through and gives us knowledge that we could put to use in the future. Storytelling is a natural part of being human. We use stories to make life easier and for some, to make memorizing something easier. We can use these stories as a way to learn from someone else’s experience and just feel what they have felt. So why do stories matter? We might have different ways of answering this but for me, stories provide an escape from reality.