Fiction Is a Terrifyingly Honest Place

The hardest decision of 2025 wasn’t financial, nor was it logistical. It was a silent admission, made while staring at a blinking cursor on a white screen: I needed to stop hiding behind facts. But fiction is a terrifyingly honest place.

For a long time, non-fiction was my shield. Writing about reality, about the tangible, offers comfortable protection. If someone disagrees, you point to the data. If someone criticizes, you point to logic. Reality justifies itself.

But there was something pulsing inside the forgotten folders of my computer. Files with random names—midnight_draft.doc, nonsensical_idea.txt—that I avoided opening, much like one avoids looking directly at the sun.

Opening these files, I understood the reason behind the fear. Fiction, I discovered too late, is a terrifyingly honest terrain. In non-fiction, we edit life so it makes sense. In fiction, the lie serves only to reveal the truths we don't have the courage to say at Sunday dinner.

Revisiting these folders was like walking into an old apartment I didn’t remember renting. There was dust, yes, but there was also an emotional architecture I had neglected. There were characters screaming things that I felt, but would never dare sign my real name to.

I realized that writing about "feelings" isn’t about being sentimental. It is about dissecting the human experience without the anesthesia of journalistic objectivity. It is stepping into cold water.

I am organizing these fragments. I am stitching together these voices I found in the dead archives of my hard drive. What is emerging is something different from everything I have published so far. It isn’t about what happened. It is about what could have happened if we had been braver—or more reckless.

Publishing here again is my public commitment not to retreat to the safety of facts. From now on, we are going to talk about what is invented, because, paradoxically, that is where I have been the most honest.

Fiction is scary because it makes no apologies. And neither will I.