The quiet radicalism here is that Didion isn't celebrating our storytelling as noble or creative—she's identifying it as necessary infrastructure for survival itself. We don't spin narratives because we're imaginative; we do it because without some coherent account of why things happen and what they mean, consciousness becomes unbearable. A person who loses the ability to construct meaning around their suffering—the stroke victim who can no longer explain their changed body to themselves, the grieving parent searching for *why* in the unanswerable—faces a particular kind of collapse that has nothing to do with their circumstances and everything to do with narrative collapse. Didion's insight demands we treat our self-told stories not as luxuries or lies, but as the essential scaffolding that keeps us upright.