I've Spent More Time in My Head Than in Real Life

Ajouté : 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]My search for answers always led me back to one point in my life when I was 10.

[00:00:07]It was the biggest turning point of my life. My early years were somewhat good.

[00:00:15]There was always food on the table, yet I barely spent any time with my parents because they were always at work. I had every toy and treat other kids could dream of. Yet, I desperately needed something completely different, a deep emotional bond. But still, things were not bad at that point. My parents loved each other, and I could feel it in those rare moments together. I was usually described as always in my head, but nothing concerning for a child my age.

[00:00:52]But everything changed at the age of 10.

[00:00:56]My parents got divorced.

[00:00:58]But what came next was even worse. They continued to live together. The following period of my life I call 7 years of hell.

[00:01:11]I don't blame them now, but back then I didn't understand what was going on.

[00:01:19]Our home, which had been the main and only safe place I'd ever known, suddenly turned into a place of emotional violence.

[00:01:30]There was barely a day when I didn't hear yelling, arguing, or crying.

[00:01:37]My parents no longer felt safe to me. My old world was destroyed, and the new one was ugly.

[00:01:49]And I found myself completely alone in it. I I had to find a way to deal with it fast.

[00:01:58]And I found one. I couldn't fight the unbearable reality. So I escaped into my own alternative version of it. But how did I make it work? Actually, it was simple. I started imagining my perfect life, the one I lacked in reality. While struggling to find joy in real life, I imagined different scenarios to create those emotions artificially.

[00:02:29]I had a pretty simple recipe back then.

[00:02:32]I used to borrow movie plots and basically incorporate myself into them.

[00:02:39]Usually I was hanging out with my favorite characters, but sometimes it could go completely wild and at some point I was already choosing fantasy over real life sometimes.

[00:02:55]I remember lying to my parents about having a lot of homework just to skip family activities because I wanted to daydream in my room. So, my parents probably thought I was just doing homework, but in fact, I was hunting demons with the Winchester brothers just for fun. Yeah, I was a badass at the age of 10. Who would have thought?

[00:03:22]The point is that I lived through these completely imaginary adventures in my head and those fantasies were mostly naive. But they gave me the emotions and experiences I desperately needed at that time. But there was a problem. I could still hear my parents arguing.

[00:03:44]So I needed to cover my ears.

[00:03:47]And that's how I fell in love with music.

[00:03:51]It not only helped me to escape the noise but also gave a much stronger stimulus to my brain. Music carried emotions by itself. So I just had to match it with the scenario I was living through in my head. I quickly mastered it and since then I was never the same.

[00:04:14]It quickly became a part of my daily routine.

[00:04:18]I was fully engaged in the process of living a better version of my life in my head.

[00:04:25]I would turn on music in my headphones and just wander around the room living through the best experiences I could imagine. I quickly became so good at it, I could trigger my emotions instantly.

[00:04:41]I could make myself laugh or cry just by imagining the right thing.

[00:04:47]It was more stimulating than a book or a video game because it was created by my brain for my brain. It felt like a perfect movie in which I was both the creator and the actor. I could be anyone. I could do anything. I felt like a god.

[00:05:11]Sounds fun, isn't it? Sounds like nothing more than a child with a vivid imagination.

[00:05:18]Except I was doing it for hours.

[00:05:23]I could literally exhaust my nervous system to the point where I felt physical pain. I felt foggy. I had to lie down and try to get rid of those thoughts because the headache was unbearable. Those were the first warning signs. But I had no chance of getting help. In fact, at that point, I was lost forever. I became addicted.

[00:05:52]But my struggle was invisible to others.

[00:05:56]I had friends. I was good at school.

[00:05:59]Teachers thought I was talented because I wrote the best essays in class. I was always told I had a vivid imagination.

[00:06:09]So I used it as an excuse.

[00:06:13]Everything was happening in my head, a place to which only I had access.

[00:06:19]That's why I loved it so much. While the real world taught me that any safe place could be lost or taken from me, I found the only one nobody could ever take away because it was invisible. It existed only in my head.

[00:06:39]I thought I had found freedom, but in fact, I had built my own cage.

[00:06:47]I was getting older, but at that point I was so dependent on my illusions that I had no chance of escaping the mistake that shaped my whole life. I failed to notice the moment when I was no longer a helpless child. I became a teenager who still believed she could not participate in reality.

[00:07:13]So I stayed in my imagination.

[00:07:16]The same mechanism that had saved me so many times from the unbearable pain of reality started becoming toxic to me. So at some point reality started losing. I no longer believed in it. My imaginary life felt more real to me than the actual life I was supposed to live.

[00:07:41]While developing an exceptional skill for imagination, I failed to develop the skill of actually living.

[00:07:50]But I didn't know that back then.

[00:07:53]Unfortunately, such knowledge always comes with a painful lesson. And in my case, it happened when I fell in love for the first time or to be honest, when I ruined it. When I first started talking to that guy, I thought it was only a matter of time before we became something more than friends. Of course, he became the main character of my daydreaming.

[00:08:21]I didn't realize how quickly it happened. In reality, we were still just friends, but in my head, we were something completely different. So, I pushed too hard.

[00:08:36]I was so desperate to close the gap between my illusions and reality as quickly as possible that I didn't let the relationship grow naturally. So, I ruined it. I was rejected. The illusion broke.

[00:08:54]Reality won for the first time. And it hurt.

[00:08:58]Now I see why, but back then it caught me off guard. I was left alone with fantasies that never came to life.

[00:09:09]It was the first time I was deeply hurt by my own supposedly safe and controlled place in my head. I felt stupid and I felt betrayed.

[00:09:22]I hated myself for wasted time. But I didn't know what to do. I couldn't get rid of daydreaming because it was the only place where everything I valued existed.

[00:09:37]To lose it meant to lose myself.

[00:09:41]And that realization was terrifying.

[00:09:46]I fell into the deep depression that took 2 years of my life.

[00:09:52]I was still delusional when I got into university.

[00:09:57]My habit was quietly poisoning my life even after I got my first job. To be honest, my real life still felt secondary.

[00:10:09]And somehow reality kept giving me excuses not to participate in it fully.

[00:10:16]It was always too cruel, too ugly, or too unfair. I still felt hopeless and truly believed I couldn't do anything.

[00:10:28]So why even bother? At least that's how I explained it to myself. Though it was only partially true. In fact, I was a control freak trying to foresee my future so I wouldn't feel uncertain. I was still a scared, abandoned child.

[00:10:51]And daydreaming was still giving me hope. A false one, of course. But I was so high on my illusions that they felt real.

[00:11:03]But everything comes to an end someday.

[00:11:07]It happened when something bigger broke into my life. Something sudden, something so brutal it couldn't be ignored. War came into my country. So I woke up. Everything I had built in my head was suddenly shattered. Every dream, every hope, every future I imagined no longer felt possible.

[00:11:34]My mind was clear for the first time. I couldn't see the future anymore. So I found myself staring into the void left by emptiness of my past years. I was 20.

[00:11:51]I had nothing. I had done nothing.

[00:11:56]Nobody truly knew me. I was a ghost in my own life.

[00:12:02]But it freed up space in my head for me to finally understand what was happening. So I started digging. I looked back on my life searching for answers. For the first time, I realized the cost I had paid throughout the years of living in my head.

[00:12:24]It was the most expensive experience I'd ever had because I paid with my time.

[00:12:35]The most important years of my life were stolen by imaginary worlds I truly believed could potentially become real.

[00:12:44]I hadn't developed real skills. I had done nothing in reality. It was a hollow life. I had been tricked by my own brain. For the first time, I saw that it was bigger than me. I depended on it. I was addicted.

[00:13:05]What was once a good friend that saved me when I needed it most had turned into a parasite feeding on my time, my opportunities, and my potential.

[00:13:20]But when I found myself at a point where reality demanded my participation like never before, I saw an opportunity to heal. I knew I couldn't fully get rid of it. So instead, I tried to become more aware of it. I found a rule that always worked no matter what.

[00:13:45]It had been proven many times throughout my life whenever reality broke through my illusions to remind me what was actually real. It sounds like this. If I can imagine something, it will never happen that way. Never.

[00:14:04]So I started using it as a mantra.

[00:14:08]As a reminder to always take what I see in my head with a grain of salt.

[00:14:16]And apparently when repeated enough times, this mantra slowly helped me lose interest in trying to live in my head instead of reality.

[00:14:28]I'm 24 now and I'm still a ghost. But now I finally found peace with my mind.

[00:14:37]It's no longer bigger than me. so I can once again treat it as a friend.

[00:14:44]Just like in the good old days, I made a decision and brought with me the best things my mind could offer. Endless creativity, a great source of ideas, and a safe place nobody could ever take away from me.

[00:15:03]So, what do you think? Was my journey through thousands of lives worth