Living in Fiction More Than Reality

Have you ever finished a book or a movie, only to realise that it never really left your mind? You go to bed thinking about it, wake up thinking about it, and somehow every unrelated and ordinary moment reminds you of a scene or a character. That is exactly what happens to me.

Whenever I become invested in a story, I do not just read it but act as I start living in it. It becomes a part of my daily thoughts, my conversations, and sometimes even the way I see the world around me. It can be a manga series like “My Hero Academia” or a romance series like the “Twisted series” books. Even though the stories are completely different, they have the same effect on me. They stay in my head long after I have turned the last page. It is almost as if the story is going to accompany me as long as I do not have another story to occupy my mental space with.

The strange part is that my mind rarely accepts the ending as it is. Instead, it begins creating endless "what if" scenarios. What if a certain character had made a different decision? What if the ending had changed by just one event? What if two people had met earlier, or never met at all? I replay these possibilities over and over again, almost as if I am trying to rewrite the story in my own head. Sometimes I spend more time thinking about these imaginary situations than I actually spent reading the book.

This does not only happen with books. Crime shows, mystery movies, and stories with bittersweet endings have a particularly strong effect on me. If a story ends on a sad note, I keep thinking about it for days. I wonder whether the characters could have had a happier future or whether things were always meant to end that way. Crime stories are different. They make me analyse every detail, every motive, and every clue, even after the credits roll. My brain keeps solving mysteries that have already been solved.

At first, this sounds harmless. After all, books are supposed to make us think. But for me, it often goes much further than that. These stories take up a surprising amount of mental space. Even while I am studying, walking, or trying to focus on something important, my thoughts quietly drift back to a fictional world. Without even noticing, I find myself replaying scenes, imagining conversations, or wondering about characters that do not actually exist.

The biggest challenge is how distracting it becomes. I can sit down with the intention of completing a task, but within minutes my mind starts wandering back to a book I finished yesterday or a movie I watched last week. I am physically present, yet mentally somewhere else. It feels like my brain has opened dozens of tabs, and the fictional ones refuse to close. Because of this, it sometimes becomes difficult to stay focused on the things that matter in the present.