While scrolling through my WhatsApp status updates, I stumbled on a post from someone who, honestly, I’m not sure what she was feeling like, but her words rubbed me the wrong way. She sounded like she was policing young people, lecturing us on what we should and shouldn’t read especially in the literary world. According to her, we shouldn’t waste our time on romance; in her opinion, fiction is junk and leaves us delusional. I was annoyed because that mindset is exactly what strips the joy out of reading.
I do wonder if the phrase “fiction isn’t real” is just the biggest lie we’ve agreed to believe. Because if fiction isn’t real, then what do I call the version of myself that only seems to breathe fully when I’m lost in someone else’s world?
I’ve tried to explain it to people the way I come alive in stories. How the pages of a book or even a scene from a movie can feel more like home than the four walls I’ve lived in my whole life. But how do you explain something like that? How do you tell someone that yes, reality feeds you, but fiction saves you? That for every moment I’ve felt unseen, a character somewhere was speaking my thoughts word for word. That for every heartbreak I couldn’t articulate, an author I’ll never meet spilled it perfectly onto a page.
And that for every joy people dismissed as too sensitive or “too dramatic, a fictional world amplified it a thousand times, letting me feel it without shame.
I’ve felt more alive reading about kingdoms that never existed, friendships that were sewn together by cosmic accidents and loves that bloom in impossible ways. I’ve walked through forests lit by magic, cried in universes that defy logic and healed in places reachable only through imagination. Tell me that’s not real.
Because here’s the truth nobody wants to admit, fiction isn’t an escape from reality, it’s the only place where our realest emotions are allowed to breathe. In the real world, we have filters, expectations, rules and masks. But in fiction, you can rage, dream and ache as much as you want. You can love recklessly. You can be the hero, the villain, the lost one, the brave one, all in the same story.
And that’s exactly why imaginary worlds feel more alive. That’s why they stay with us long after the last chapter closes and that’s absolutely why a sentence written by someone miles away can feel like it was cut straight out of your chest.
Call it escapism if you want, but to me, fiction is a lifeline. A beautiful sanctuary. It is that one place where emotions don’t have to justify themselves.
Every time I close a book or finish a story, I carry a little piece of those worlds back with me, like a secret talisman against the dullness of everyday life.
Fiction may not be real, but the way it makes me feel is the realest thing I know.