Escape reality through fiction

Go to the store, pick up a book, and get out of your head. You’ve lost yourself. You’ve changed. Your interests and hobbies have slipped through your fingers and you can’t help but to wonder who you are anymore. Whether there was a traumatic incident in your life that caused you to turn yourself off and shut down, or you’ve matured and become a completely different person from the one you previously knew.

Take a breath, this can be a difficult thing to admit: you need to escape reality and find yourself again. What is the best way to do this? Divulge yourself in a new universe. Something greater than yourself and the world around you. Sink into a fictional world where you can connect and relate to characters and use their life stories to shape your own. Use their story to pick up your pencil, erase your past, and start over. After all, it was only your first chapter, your first draft.

My freshman year of college, I built up brick walls around myself, hid who I was, and couldn’t find anything to help me cope with the things I was going through at the time. In November of 2017, I picked up a book. I never was much into literature, I was a kid who avoided my summer reading assignments and rolled my eyes or scoffed when people suggested I read. But, something was different this time. It was the connection to the fictional characters, what they were going through, the ways they dealt with their problems and developed into seemingly new people by the end of the novel.

The book was ​All The Bright Places b​y Jennifer Niven. It was a classic young adult novel, riddled with tragedy and recovery and complicated romance. But mostly, it was about mental health. Mental health can be a touchy subject, it can be triggering, and sometimes nearly impossible to discuss in a typical conv ersational setting. With the two characters working together to subside their suicidal thoughts, this book gave me the chance to feel as though I was able to have a discussion about what I was feeling, even if I wasn’t speaking at all. It was through the personal relationship that I felt with the main character, and following along her journey that helped me realize that maybe, just maybe, I’m not so alone after all.

Other books that have helped me through a lot are ​The Pact, ​by Jodi Picoult, and ​The Impossible Knife of Memory, b​y Laurie Halse Anderson, and ​Silence, ​by Natasha Preston. Sometimes to find yourself, you have to escape yourself. Shut the world off, read a good book, and reflect afterwards.

What can you learn through the theme in it? Is there a way it can help you figure out how to be yourself again? Can it help you appreciate the little things in life that you couldn’t see anymore? Chances are, it can. You just have to look, or read, hard enough.