The World in My Head
I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. Back then I didn’t know it had a name. I just thought I had a wild imagination. It was my escape. My comfort. My drug. I could be sitting in a classroom, trapped in a long church service, or lying in bed with nothing to do, and I’d slip away. No one noticed I was gone because my body was still there.
When I finally found the term for it in college, I felt this rush of relief. I wasn’t the only one. There were other people like me, and researchers were actually studying it. I thought, “Yes. Finally. If it has a name, there has to be a cure.” But that hope faded quick. The research was new, and it wasn’t something you could just fix.
My worlds have always been intense. Sometimes I’m a singer or an actor, someone overlooked until the world suddenly wakes up and realizes I’m everything they’ve been missing. The love, the attention, the guilt from everyone who ignored me, I drink it in. I feel it in my chest. Sometimes the stories last weeks. Sometimes they turn sexual. In those, I’m not just wanted, I’m unavoidable. People can’t get enough of me, and they never stop wanting me.
It’s addictive because in my head, I control it all. No disappointments. No half-hearted praise. No failed attempts. Just a perfect loop of validation and desire.
Real life doesn’t do that for me. Even big wins, things I worked for, don’t hit as hard. I passed a major exam recently, got the congratulations, but the high didn’t last. In my head, achievements are pure joy. Out here, they come with pressure and expectations I’m not sure I can meet.
MD has been my safety net, but it’s also been the trap. It’s kept me company in the worst moments, but it’s stolen time, energy, and attention from the life I keep saying I want. I’ve imagined the abs, the career, the travels with people I love. But I’d spend more time imagining them than doing the work to get there.
Only now, with the right treatment, do I feel that gap closing. I have more energy. I can act on things instead of just thinking about them. And I want that kind of control, the kind where I decide what I do with my life, not just what happens in my head.
If I could tell my younger self anything, I wouldn’t tell him to stop daydreaming. I’d tell him: You’ll never stop looking for ways to make this better. You’ll fight to understand yourself. And that fight will get you closer to the life you’ve been picturing all along.
I still go there sometimes. I still let myself slip away when I’m stuck in a place I don’t want to be. But I’m starting to learn that life out here, even when it’s messy and slow, can feel more real than the perfect world I’ve been running back to all my life.












