Fiction & Non-Fiction
My sister friend was looking at my Christmas list (which is just a huge list of books on Amazon) and she made the comment that I’ve switched from fiction to non-fiction. And she’s right. Something fundamental about my interests has changed. Dynamically.
I sometimes say that if we’re talking about dissociative behavior, what’s more important to think about in terms of my own behavior are the times I am NOT dissociating: my “snap back to reality” moments. They’re not often, but they’re powerful, like little tsunamis of awareness flooding my central nervous system with a whole new level of panic and assessment.
When I say that my auto-pilot function runs at peak capacity, I mean it. I am almost never operating in full hands-on pilot mode. Those moments when I am not on auto-pilot are like golden drops of rain in the desert, rare, but furious.
But if you look at the reel of my reading and daydreaming behavior backwards and see the snapshots of me getting younger and more naive, the amount of fiction I poured myself into (or did it pour into me?) increases exponentially. As a young person, it seemed to me like there was nowhere else to go except for inwards.
Fiction, for me, has always been an escape method. It was the first drug I had access to, and I gorged myself on it. The question of my existence was too much to handle so early and I never found myself in a place where I felt safe enough to explore the aspects of my existence in full. So I didn’t. I read. I read everything I could get my hands on. I won reading contests in school without even trying. It wasn’t about achievement back then, though the adults around me acted like it was; it was about being allowed to close my bedroom door and ignore everything for as long as I could, to tune everything out as best as I could. Fiction is like a dreaming state.
But now, as I begin to acknowledge my reality in what I’ll call here the waking world one little step at a time, I am reading less fiction and much more non-fiction. The more educated I am, the more I want to know, it seems. Fiction has fallen from the top slot and now I read all kinds of things. The news, biographies, stand-up comedy (it counts, damnit!), books on theory, history books, books with citations of books with more citations, journal articles, the opinion section of the newspaper.
What I love about this transition is that I’ve resorted to non-fiction in order to more fully grasp the concept of fiction and it’s relationship to how we conceptualize our lives. I haven’t left, in other words. I’ve leveled up. And for me, that means disassociating less, engaging with reality more, something that is a very positive sign of progress when it comes to my narrative intake and it’s relationship to my behavior, I think.
If life is about anything, perhaps it’s how long and how intensely you can stay awake, stay engaged, stay alive, continue moving forward. And for me, that has always been a struggle. It hurts to stay awake too long. When I am awake, I am bright, but I am vulnerable. I can see things as they could play out, like in a story, and I enjoy problem-solving, but the problem is that I have not been safe and secure when I’ve existed in this state and so, I can only handle it for so long before I resume auto-pilot. That’s how I have functioned for the majority of my life.
But lately, as the dust has begun to settle from so much awake time and furious bouts of deep thought on the intersection of fiction and reality, I can see more clearly the function of fiction and the ways in which I abused it as an escape rather than a study on how to go about my life. And also, as I grow older and slowly inch towards some of my goals in stability like owning a house, paying down my debt, being able to comfortably afford the necessities, and other, quite frankly, boring milestones, I am better able to relax and assess more, often, through my newfound intake of non-fiction. That doesn’t mean it happens more often, necessarily, that I wake up on full power, but it does mean that I am getting better at strategically planning for such moments to make the most of them.
I have learned that sometimes it’s all I can do to operate on low power mode, greet 3:00 am like an old friend and drink in the silence when I can because I will need this emotional energy for those moments which come more often and more determined now, in which I decide to do whatever it takes to do what I love, to operate at full capacity and gain a better understanding of myself and how fiction is, for better or worse, a part of me. Until then, don’t mind me. I’ll be reading non-fiction.
