There is a particular feeling that is incredibly important to me. It is like pain, but it doesn’t hurt. It sticks in me like a burr, almost tactile in that I can endlessly pick at it but intangible in that nothing I ever do can affect it. It settles in my chest, at the very center of my physical being–where we often depict things such as the soul being located when we must depict them as something within a body rather than something beside it–occupying the place I would have told you was my heart before I learned how human anatomy is laid out. It isn’t something I can conjure myself, I can’t do anything to keep it around, and it will arrive slowly and then suddenly, completely unnoticeable until it is fully there and undeniably present. I don’t have a name for this feeling, but I suspect that this is what a lot of people are talking about when they describe themselves as feeling inspired by something. I also suspect that this feeling is what people are talking about when they say that they have been moved. If I had to put into it into as few words as possible, I would say that this feeling is the sensation of being moved, but that feels reductive to the point of discomfort on my part since it is not only the sensation of being moved but also the thing that being moved pushes against and the place from which the force of this movement originates. A contradiction of sensations and feelings that I can’t make more sense of than this, despite having felt this cluster of feelings for as long as I can remember.

Most of the time, this feeling is caused by stories of some kind. The form of them doesn’t matter, nor does the subject. There’s very little that I can point to that might indicate a pattern to these stories since I have been equally affected by stories that helped me give voice to my truest self and stories that felt so alien that there was nothing I could connect to. A particular season of a podcast, in the moments of it wrapping up as the narration swells in a particular scene and creates an image that I will never forget. A shard of a story, part of a murial that has been abandoned midway through as a result of the cruel twists of life. The start of something whose end I’ve glimpsed on the horizon that I will wait patiently for, no matter how long it takes. A story that hit so close to home it took real effort to disentangle myself from the telling because, really, not everything is about me or has to be related back to me. A little nothing line in a little nothing book built on the idea that sometimes the little nothings in life can be the most important things of all. A thought I had, one time, that crystallized decades of my life into focus in a way I’d never quite managed. The weight of a history that refuses to let anyone carry it… If you can spot a pattern that I cannot, please, let me know. I’d love nothing more than to be able to feel this on command or avoid it when I do not want to give over my entire day to distraction.

Every time it happens, I let myself marvel at it. It is a wonderous thing, to be sure, since how often can we say that something so deeply personal and emphatically a part of us originated from somewhere besides ourselves? It creates a moment where I can understand people who claim to have had a god touch their hearts, heard the voice of the divine, or felt the hand of fate in their lives. I would almost believe that some great, unmistakeable power in the nebulous “above” had reached into my existence to bridge the gap between myself and another person in this moment so that they could push and pull my soul, but I’ve read to many stories and studied this feeling in myself too deeply to think it is anything other than the oft-described power of art. It is important to me to recognize that this sensation, this cluster of feelings I treasure and so rarely get to enjoy, is the result of human effort. Another person, living their own life and occupying as much mental space as I do but in a way I’ll never be able to see or fully understand, created something in such a way that it deeply and profoundly impacted me. Nature cannot induce this feeling (though it can create a similar type of response in me) and there is no artificial means of producing this result. It is purely a moment of connection via art and stories (my favorite type of expression) between two people.

This feeling, this cluster of emotions-as-sensation, is what drives me to tell my own stories. I want to litter existence with my own attempts to evoke this experience so that other people might come to appreciate it the way I do. So that other people have the opportunies to feel this deep, untouchable part of themselves and sound out the shape of their soul by the way it reverberates within them. I might never know if I’ve succeeded since I don’t even know if I’ve ever been able to communicate to others what the things they’ve made have evoked within me, but I do not need to succeed at this to spend my life trying. There is value in trying to do things, regardless of whether you succeed or fail. There’s more value in succeeding, of course, but that doesn’t make the attempts any less valuable. It would be nice to know if I ever succeed in this, if I can ever stir something to life in someone else the way that others have stirred things to life within me, but not knowing is never going to stop me from carrying on anyway.