For most of my life, fiction was one of the only things that inspired me. I was a shy kid and young adult and, for me, inhabiting more forthright lives was the ultimate appeal. For that reason I was a fiction junkie, and I used fictional worlds as a placeholder for the real one.

If I was feeling lonely I’d watch a romantic movie and share in the secondhand joy of finding true love. If I were feeling hopeless and afraid, I’d read a Stephen King book or watch a dark drama to reassure myself that it could always be worse. If I were feeling weak and useless I would watch an action movie, or pick up a comic book and see through the eyes of a hero for awhile.

Jerry Maguire was the me of conviction, following his principles to success and love. Carrie was my darkness, pouring her rage-masked sorrow all over the world. Spider-Man was the hopeful me, swinging through life with a quip and a web, always doing good.

If you’d asked me why I liked those characters, I might have said something like “they’re cool” or “I like their attitude,” or something equally vague. I didn’t really know why I felt a connection with them, I just knew they made me feel something other than despair. Little did I know that this was the catalyst that would set me down a path towards everything I hoped for out of life.

At the time though, my life was getting worse as I watched from the sidelines. I shuffled through high school then spent two solitary years skipping classes in college before dropping out without even friends to show for it. I had a string of bad jobs that I bounced aimlessly between, underachieving and in a state of constant dissatisfaction. I got into relationships I didn’t want to be in, and pushed away anyone who did or could love me. I was miserable and terrified, trapped in a life I didn’t want and could see no way out of.

Meanwhile, in stories, my heroes continued their adventures, and I traveled along with them. What they did seemed impossible and it taunted me, but I was increasingly drawn to it. I started to see something underlying the connection I felt with some characters: a certain pattern that defined them. I saw them going through struggles of all kinds and began to see patterns around what they did in the face of them. Often I felt a strong emotional response in those moments, especially when their struggles aligned with my own. I didn’t know what to make of that exactly, but analyzing it certainly made my reading/watching experiences more fun. It was an added layer to the game: enjoy the story, escape real life, feel a bit better, AND find the pattern.

I started reading and watching for these patterns. I started seeing them repeated everywhere I looked. I also started seeing when characters fell outside of these patterns, and it seemed to directly parallel how much of an emotional impact their story had on me. I seemed to be circling some truth.

Here’s an example of a pattern: When a character succeeds it almost always includes a change they did not expect. For instance, young Simba in The Lion King wants to be king, but mainly so he can do whatever he wants. On his long journey to the throne, however, he realizes that the Hakuna Matata life only weakens him. He triumphs when he faces his fears and takes on responsibility willingly. He doesn’t want to be king anymore, he MUST become king to protect his pride. His prize is not at all what he imagined when he sang that he couldn’t wait to be king, but it’s so much more rewarding.

That seemed important to me. At first I thought it meant that, if the stories were true, wanting the wrong things could be the cause of problems. That’s certainly not wrong, but I came to realize that the things I wanted most were the things that Simba and all heroes eventually earn: self-acceptance and a life worth living. Those weren’t up for internal debate.

Pretending not to care about finding my place in the world only dead ended in bitterness and resentment, which ensured I’d never find inspiration. First I pretended I didn’t need love or acceptance. Then, to make it easier, I said that those thing didn’t even exist. When I learned to believe that, it became true for me. And that was more tolerable than facing a world full of hope that I couldn’t be part of. In the world I’d created, nothing really mattered because there was no worthwhile reward. Family was just an inconvenient obligation, so I made sure to push them away. I treated any work as the necessary evil I saw it to be. I went through the motions of life, but there was no real point.

You probably meet people who think this way all the time. You may even be one of them. If you are then you know that it’s soul-crushing. I’d watched and read so many stories that it was tempting to think that things would just right themselves at some point. All the misery was just a prologue if I waited long enough for the plot to turn. Life would happen to me eventually. But I watched the people around me. I saw them live the same hopeless way I was. And I saw them die tragically, with no upswing to their character arc. I knew that one day I would join them. Maybe sooner than I thought. Sometimes I thought maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

I wanted out of that terrible world; I was desperate to escape it. I kept looking at the patterns in stories. They made me feel something. Maybe they could point the way out.

If wanting a life worth living wasn’t the problem maybe my interpretation of that pattern was incomplete. Maybe success didn’t lie in their internal desires, but in what they did to achieve them.

That seemed closer to the truth. The patterns of growth and change in characters were not about new thoughts, feelings, or desires, even if those were implied, but about new actions. They inspired because they did something meaningful.

Here are two patterns of actions that recur in stories.

• Characters who succeed tend not to lie or to stop lying
• Characters who succeed tend to display selflessness

These actions don’t necessarily indicate new thought processes, though they can. We tend to be very aware of our thoughts’ ability to influence our actions, but less of our actions’ ability to influence our thoughts. When I started to become aware of that fact and its implications it changed my life.

It changed my life because I started to see the same patterns not only in fiction but in myself and the people around me. I started to see that when I acted out the patterns in the stories, I saw similar results, for better and for worse. What’s more, the things that inspired me the most were directly linked to the things in my own life that were the most misaligned. It resonated with me when characters told the truth because I casually destroyed relationships by lying and diminishing others’ trust in me. It resonated with me when a character did hard things in the face of fear because I hid for fear of being vulnerable, and became cowardly.

I realized that the patterns and the actions that defined my life were all right there for me to see. The patterns in stories weren’t theoretical — they weren’t even fictional — they could be prescriptive! I started to realize that what I had always viewed as just entertainment could provide warnings or, even more powerfully, act as guidelines to living. It was a revelation that I find hard to describe. It was like looking at a light bulb and realizing it was actually a sunrise.

I’ve always cried over works of fiction, but now I was a firehose. I watched all of my favorite movies again, and this time I saw the characters, I saw the patterns, and I saw the actions that formed those patterns. I couldn’t NOT see them. They were varied but had common themes. Don’t lie or your life will be worse, don’t let your resentment destroy your world, don’t do things that make you hate yourself, etc.

It wasn’t just things to do and not to do, it was direction. By paying attention to what I watched I could feel my inspiration leading me away from some paths and towards others. It told me concrete things about what I needed to be doing with my life and where I was veering off course. I watched, I read, I paid attention. I used the fiction in my life as a mirror to show me my blind-spots. It showed me the scariest things about what I feared and what I denied, but also what I needed and what gave me hope. With deliberation and care, slowly at first but with increasing confidence, I started acting out what I saw. And my life transformed before my eyes.

I’m still transforming now as I train that ability to bring myself into focus. I see myself more clearly than ever before now, and I use stories to course-correct when I encounter ones that move me. The areas of existence that were previously defined by dissatisfaction and hopelessness (relationships, job, etc.) have become the most gratifying and rewarding parts of my life. But those external successes are dwarfed by the changes I feel on the inside. I have love and acceptance from the people important to me, including my family. I have a life filled with inspiration and meaning.

There are also new feelings that come up when I’m lost in fictional worlds now. I feel strong reactions when I see characters behaving in ways that had little effect on me in the past. I know for sure that there’s something I should be looking at in those instances.

The patterns are there to guide me if I look properly, and the signal for them is emotion. When I watch a character act, and I feel inspiration or resonance, it’s a cue for me to pay attention. I train that impulse to look closer: to see what they’re doing, and what they’re not doing. I act on what I see.

My life isn’t perfect, I struggle and suffer as we all do. But I have things in my life I never would have thought possible before. And things are still getting better. I love fiction; I watch it carefully, but I live in the real world now. What was once a crutch has become a trusted walking stick, a tool for feeling my way into the future. The path is smoother every day.