Fear is … a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.

Walker’s line treats fear not just as an emotion but as a narrative impulse: the mind, confronted with uncertainty, automatically invents scenarios to explain what might happen next. Calling it “unintentional storytelling” suggests that fear operates like a primitive, default form of imagination—fast, vivid, and often pessimistic—producing plots of danger and loss without conscious authorial control. The claim that we are “born knowing how to do” it frames fear as innate and universal, akin to a built-in survival mechanism. The quote also implies a kinship between anxiety and fiction-making: both assemble fragments into meaning, but fear’s stories tend to narrow possibility rather than expand it.