For a long time, I believed the common line about reading: that books are an escape. A softer place to land. A way out of whatever feels unbearable in real life.
But that stopped being true for me.
Because the world we’re living in right now — America in 2025 — doesn’t just feel overwhelming. It feels intentionally isolating. Cruel in ways that are normalized. Fragmented in ways that make connection harder instead of easier.
I wasn’t trying to escape that reality.
I was trying not to lose myself inside it.
The World Makes It Easy to Disappear
Everything about this moment encourages disconnection. Rage alone. Scroll alone. Grieve alone. Perform certainty or stay quiet. Keep it moving.
Over time, I felt that working — and not in a good way. I felt less curious. Less energized. Less capable of imagining anything beyond the next headline.
Reading didn’t fix the world. But it interrupted that shrinking.
I Read to Feel Less Alone
The books I loved this year weren’t light, and they weren’t optimistic in any shallow sense. They were full of longing, grief, fear, tenderness, and people trying to love each other inside systems that made that hard.
What I felt while reading them wasn’t escape — it was recognition.
Recognition that other people are still asking the same questions I am. Still noticing the same fractures. Still trying to live fully inside a world that often feels hostile to softness.
Reading became a way back into shared humanity.
Stories Create Connection When Everything Else Fractures
When the outside world feels like it’s splintering us into camps, algorithms, and noise, stories do the opposite. They slow us down. They invite us into someone else’s interior life. They remind us that complexity doesn’t cancel worth.
Reading that much — and loving what I read — gave me back energy I didn’t realize I’d lost. Excitement. Confidence. A sense that attention itself can be an act of resistance.
Not because books distract us from reality, but because they insist that inner lives still matter.
And stories connect us to one another. That connection is vital in today’s world.
How Writing Entered the Picture (Honestly)
I’ve never written before. Not seriously. Not publicly. Not with any kind of plan.
Writing didn’t come from discipline or ambition. It came from immersion.
After reading so many stories that resonated with me — stories that felt human, flawed, emotionally honest — I started noticing something else: how few of them reflected the life I recognize most closely.
I wanted more stories about brown girls who aren’t “from somewhere else.”
More stories about love between people with plenty of faults.
More stories where happiness isn’t the absence of obstacles, but something chosen in spite of them.
At some point, reading stopped being enough on its own. Not because it failed — but because it opened something.
I didn’t decide to become a writer. I felt a pull to try telling a story like mine, because reading had reminded me how much stories connect us — and how much absence there still is.
Reading Was the First Act
If writing exists in my life now, it’s because reading came first.
Reading kept me connected in a world that profits from isolation. It reminded me that longing is human, not indulgent. That love stories aren’t escapist — they’re connective tissue.
I don’t read to escape anymore.
I read to stay awake to other people, to myself, and to the possibility that even in a fractured world, shared stories can still bring us closer together.
The Books That Carried Me Through 2025
Some of the books that carried me through 2025 are ones I still think about daily—not because they distracted me from the world, but because they reminded me I wasn’t alone in it. I shared those separately, for anyone who needs a place to start.
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