Storytelling
On the light and shadow of narrative power
The phone call began with five words I’ll never forget:
“Your mother jumped out the window.”
I was on a trip with friends, drinking by the pool, my phone turned off. When I got up to grab another caipirinha, the homeowner walked toward me, eyebrows raised. He handed me his phone—“it’s urgent.”
On the line, one of my best friends stuttered:
“Your mo-mother jumped out of the window… but she’s fine.”
Confused and terrified, I pressed him:
“What do you mean she’s fine? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know the details. She tried to escape and ended up on your neighbor’s balcony—the one on the first floor. But she’s fine. The firefighters came. She’s safe.”
That same night I took a bus home, and I’d never felt a trip stretch out so endlessly.
My mom suffers from bipolar disorder. It swings her from crushing lows to manic highs. That day, in a manic state, my grandmother wouldn’t let her leave the apartment—so she tied bedsheets together and tried to climb out the window (can’t deny she’s quite resourceful.)
For a split second, when I heard those five words on the phone, I thought I had lost her. That moment changed me. It made me see how little time there is to waste, how fragile life is, and how quickly everything can turn.
And what I’ve discovered over the years, whenever I share this story, is that even though it’s deeply personal, people recognize themselves in it—in the fear, the love, and the urgency it carries.
That’s the power of stories: they transport us into another life, letting us feel what shapes people, what drives them, why they act the way they do. And in the smallest detail, they open a window onto the universal—reminding us that no matter how far apart we seem, we are never as different as we imagine.
In that way, stories become a bridge. They open us, soften us, and make us pay attention.
But every bridge carries two directions. The same path that can bring us closer can also be used to lead us astray. That’s the paradox of storytelling: the very force that makes it so human is the same force that makes it vulnerable to manipulation.
The Dark Side of Storytelling
Propagandists, politicians, and big corporations understand one thing about storytelling:
Stories bypass our defenses.
When someone tries to argue with us, our analytical brain lights up, scanning for inconsistencies and counterarguments. But when we’re drawn into a story, we don’t feel like we’re being persuaded. We suspend disbelief and let our guard down.
Look closely, though, and you’ll see a pattern that never fails to appear on the darker side of storytelling: it deals in half-truths. Ideas that sound insightful, even useful, but that conceal crucial nuance and bury the wider context we need to really understand.
They frame themselves as “bringing people together” through innovation, while hiding the fact that their model thrives on addiction.
They glorify the “self-made man” on his individual grit, while ignoring systemic advantages or exploitation.
They cast themselves as a “victim” of outside forces, with a strongman leader positioned as the savior, obscuring the corruption or incompetence within.
Those stories are crafted and delivered to us every day. Inside offices to keep bright minds chained to desks. In political debates, to sway indecisive voters. And in the media, to disguise the true motives of power.
To keep from being pulled into those traps, I’ve learned to ask myself a simple question whenever a story stirs something in me—particularly when it awakens the darker emotions of anger, envy, or greed:
“What’s the incentive behind this story?”
Ask it honestly, and more often than not, you’ll see the story for what it is: not a window into truth, but a carefully polished tool of persuasion. A narrative built to secure money, power, or approval.
But that’s only half the picture. The same force that can manipulate and control us can also be used to connect, expand, and even heal us.
The Beauty of Storytelling
Seven years ago, I took a screenwriting course from David Mamet on Masterclass, and as I was going through it, he said something that stirred something in me.
He ranted that screenwriters kept forcing moral themes into their stories, when, to him, the writer’s real job was simple: give the audience 120 minutes of entertainment.
Looking back years later, I can see how some films are wielded as weapons to push an author’s ideology. But I also think the opposite idea—that a story can be nothing more than entertainment—has been stretched too far, especially in an age when social media reduces narrative to little more than dopamine hits.
But I see a third possibility:
The ability to explore deep themes without steering the reader toward a single conclusion.
The stories that linger in our minds don’t try to persuade us to think a certain way. They just open a gate for you to explore new perspectives, and through these perspectives, better understand yourself and the world around you.
Christopher Nolan was once asked what the spinning top meant at the end of his movie Inception.
Instead of giving the interviewer the answer he was looking for, Nolan explained that ambiguity gives the film its emotional impact. As he put it, “once the ending is explained, the film loses its mystery and the viewer no longer has room to find their own meaning.”
These types of stories create a space where truth emerges not because the storyteller dictates it, but because the audience finds it for themselves. A good story lets us “live the questions” without resolving them prematurely.
It’s more like an invitation to expand people’s thinking, rather than a tool to lead us to a narrow conclusion.
In the book Hidden Wholeness, Palmer suggests that truth emerges more openly when we don’t confront it head-on. Instead of debating directly, he invites people to engage with a “third thing”—a poem, a story, a piece of music—that speaks its own truth metaphorically. Instead of confronting your ego directly, stories offer a character you can project onto, a struggle you can inhabit, and a meaning you can wrestle with at your own pace—often giving voice to what you might not otherwise dare to say.
In this way, storytelling becomes a protective cover that makes honesty less threatening and dialogue more genuine.
The Anatomy of Storytelling
Every great story contains the one thing we spend most of our lives trying to avoid:
Tension.
Look closely, and you’ll see it woven into our most defining experiences.
The birth of a child. The interview that could change your career. The silence before a breakup. The moment you’re asked to speak up. The wait for medical results. The looming risk of losing someone you love.
Tension is uncomfortable, but it’s also the heartbeat of being alive. Without it, there’s no movement, no growth, no reason to care. Stories mirror this truth. That’s why great stories are full of conflict, uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradoxes—because that’s where life actually happens.
Another important part of stories is specificity. Carl Rogers used to say:
“What is most personal is most universal.”
When you anchor a story in something tangible—your mother’s laugh, the silence in a room after bad news—you give people a place to stand. Strangely, the closer you get to your own lived detail, the easier it becomes for others to see themselves in it.
Abstraction keeps a safe distance, but it also leaves people outside the experience. Concreteness invites them in, letting them project their own memories, emotions, and questions into the story. That’s where connection happens.
And if there’s one more element that makes stories great, it’s surprise.
In the early days, stories were a survival tool. Around the fire, a good story wasn’t the one everyone had heard before; it was the one that carried something new. The hidden path to water, the sudden shift in an enemy’s tactics, the animal that attacked from where no one expected. A story that only repeated the obvious wasn’t just dull—it failed its purpose of keeping people alive.
That instinct hasn’t left us. Our brains are prediction machines, always scanning for the next step. If a story unfolds exactly as expected, we check out—because there’s nothing left to learn.
That’s why great stories defy expectations. They don’t shock for the sake of it, but open a door you didn’t know was there. They reveal the overlooked detail, the hidden contradiction, the truth sitting in plain sight that no one dared to name.
Life works the same way. Its deepest lessons often arrive as surprises—unwanted, impossible to script.
That phone call about my mother came out of nowhere and could have ended in tragedy. For a moment, I thought it had. And yet, as terrifying as it was, what stayed with me wasn’t only the fear—it was the clarity that life is fragile, urgent, and never guaranteed.
And so the question isn’t simply whether we tell stories, but whether we dare to tell them honestly.
We can smooth them into comfort, stripping out the very things that make them matter. Or we can let them breathe—with tension, with detail, with surprise—so they echo the way life actually feels.
A story isn’t just a sequence of events. It’s an opening that invites us to glimpse the different possibilities of life. And it’s a mirror that reminds us we’re not alone.