The Fiction Fix

The world can be so intimidating that, in excessive intervals, we teleport ourselves into lovelier worlds of fiction – into places we like to get lost in, into times residing between but the phantom folds of our memories, into storylines that we wish to dissolve into.

Looking into nonexistent realms becomes a coping stratagem that seems to vacuum away our existence. You start feeling less real, more immobilized limbs and skin. Fantasy can be a blackhole if you give it the power to be so, but how do you know if you bestowed it such control?

Locate the reasoning behind your constant visits to make-believe realms.

It may be that you find reality overwhelming. You cannot take the unbearable anxiousness you feel, the solemnity, the loneliness, the wrath, the pain, and all the negative emotions. To cope, you withdraw into fiction where you know things will eventually get better, or if it won’t get better, then at least you know it’s not true. It’s not real anyway, it’s just fiction anyway.

Or perhaps, you just cannot stand the unforeseeable consequences of your every word and move. Accountability is terrifying so you hide in fantasies where you are not held responsible for anything because there, you have no word nor move. You are an observer yet, you are not absent in the journey. You like feeling as if you are part of something big without deciding on anything or sacrificing anything when in fact you are deluding yourself. Nothing will happen without a word or a move.

It may be that you find your life anti-climactic. Everything is dull and dreary, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing is transpiring in your life so you run to an imagined universe with monsters, companions, and sweet adventures instead of setting out into the real world and creating your own tales and journeys.

There are tons of reasons behind an inclination for fantasies that you neglect to live in your realities.

This is not to say that fiction is bad; fiction is good if your intention behind going into it is healthy. It’s all a matter of reflection and internalization.

The fact remains though: however gratifying it is to live in a livelier world without any direct consequences, there remains the responsibility to be real; to live outside your head and outside your fiction fix.