When the World is Too Loud, I Disappear Into a Book (And I'm Not Sorry)

There's a specific kind of exhaustion that doesn't come from not sleeping enough. It's the kind that builds when you've been paying attention too hard for too long.

I've been doing that a lot lately.

If you've been anywhere near a news feed, a group chat, or honestly just another human being in the last few weeks, you know what I mean. ICE raids. Deportations of people who've lived here for decades, people with kids in Texas public schools, people who are our neighbors. Protests getting met with force. The administration cheerfully dismantling protections like they're clearing a shelf before closing time.

And I'm sitting here in Austin, far from the family I'd rather be with, trying to hold it together while the country I'm living in does its thing.

So I've been dissociating. Productively. Into books. Multiple books, actually, at the same time, because apparently one fictional world isn't enough to drown out this one.

Here's my current setup: I'm listening to The Bond That Burns by Briar Boleyn while also physically reading A Curse of Blood & Stone by K.A. Tucker on my Kindle. Both are second books in their series, which means I'm already emotionally invested and there is absolutely no safe exit. I walked into both of these knowing exactly what I was doing to myself, and I regret nothing.

The Bond That Burns is giving me everything I need right now: a heroine who didn't ask for any of this but is going to survive it anyway, fae politics that are somehow less exhausting than real ones, and a slow burn that is genuinely making me feral. Meanwhile A Curse of Blood & Stone has me in a chokehold for completely different reasons. Tucker writes characters who are flawed in ways that feel real, not in a "quirky protagonist" way but in a "this person has actual wounds and is doing their best" way. Both series are the literary equivalent of crawling under a weighted blanket. Highly recommend for fellow chaos gremlins trying to stay sane out here.

Yes, I listen to one book while reading another. Not at the exact same moment, obviously. I'm chaotic but I'm not that chaotic. It's more like I rotate depending on whether I need to be doing something with my hands or whether I can fully collapse into the couch and let the words wash over me. Audiobook for the dishes, Kindle for the disappearing act. It doubles my escape routes, and honestly that feels very on brand for right now.

There's something almost radical about choosing a fictional world when this one is demanding so much of you. It's not avoidance, not really. It's maintenance. You can't pour from an empty goblet, or whatever the witchy version of that saying is.

I know I'm not alone in this. Some of us retreat into stories. Some of you are baking bread at midnight or reorganizing your bookshelf by color at 2 a.m. because it's the one thing you can actually control right now. Some of you are making playlists, or taking long drives out to the Hill Country just to feel something that isn't dread.

So tell me, genuinely: what are you doing to survive the noise?

What's your escape hatch right now? Books, music, hiking the greenbelt, rewatching the same comfort show for the fourth time? Are you leaning into the weird, the cozy, the creative? And if you're a fellow two-books-at-once person, I need to know what you're reading, because we should absolutely be suffering together.

Drop it in the comments. I want to know what's keeping your weird little heart in one piece.

Because we're all doing the best we can, and sometimes the best we can looks like disappearing into a good book for a few hours and pretending someone else's fictional apocalypse is more manageable than ours.

No shame in that. None at all.

Under the same stars, Alexis