Have you ever watched a movie that you have gotten so into that you feel like you’re standing in the scene and experiencing it, totally forgetting your own life? No? Me neither. However, I have felt that way about books! Books are the best way to escape the real world. It also helps me cope with my anxiety by giving me a distraction from it.

When you get into a good book - like a really good book - your life drastically changes. I used to hate reading. My parents would try to find ways to motivate me to spend an hour a day reading books for school. Not even the fun kinds of books. To me, there was no such thing as “fun reading”. It was boring, and if I flipped the page wrong I would get a paper cut. Nothing fun about it.

In middle school, a certain series of books caught my eye, mostly because all of my friends were reading them and I got a bad case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) because I couldn’t partake in the conversations about it. So what did I do? I read the books. I fell in love with the books. I fell in love with reading.

Now that I am OBSESSED with reading, it helped me escape the real world that is my life. My life that is full of depression and anxiety; everything on the media is negative and depressing. I took to reading books about vampires and mystical creatures, because their world was magical - the complete opposite of mine. It was an amazing escape! It was so much fun getting to know the characters, trying to predict what is going to happen and trying your hardest not to read ahead to see if you’re right.

Having that escape, that relief from life, was the best thing that happened to me. To this day, I read a chapter or two of a fun reading book (no longer about vampires and mystical creatures), and I can go to bed with little anxiety, but instead, have dreams about what I think will come next. What can I say? Reading is a great distraction!