Obsession with Fictional Characters??

Basically I've started to notice more and more lately that I've been obsessing too much about fictional characters and worlds. I know that might not seem serious but hear me out. I do have some pretty bad social issues and struggle to have successful interactions with others, as well as having a lot of difficulty forming emotional attachments to other people. There's no real reason that I can think of, it's just how I am.

But I do form very close and intimate attachments with fictional characters. I can empathize with how they feel, I make up stories about them all the time, I play out scenes/conversations between characters in my head all day, I relate nearly every experience I have with them, sometimes repeat the same scenarios over and over with some changes and sometimes it's just random, I act as the character in my mind and play their role, I daydream, etc. I don't insert myself into any of this btw. It's all just purely focused on these characters. They might change from time to time, but I usually get stuck with one or two in particular that I'm truly enamored with/obsessed with for a year or several years at a time. If the character dies, it feels to me like real grief and is extremely painful. I actually went through 2-3 years of an ongoing serious depression due to a fanfiction I read where a character died. It was so bad I got help but only my gradual losing interest in that series and moving on to another one healed the pain. My current obsession is a character from an anime who might die soon, and I worry about how I'll react to that and whether it will affect my life as badly as something similar (but not even as serious, since it was fanfiction and not canon) did a few years ago.

Anyway, the reason I feel this is a problem is because I do feel like it interferes with my life. I'm currently in grad school and getting ready to start a career in OT. I will need to learn to focus more on reality and figure out who I am if I want to be successful and provide the best care for my future patients. I don't even know how I got to this point if I'm honest; my whole life has been like a daydream where I'm escaping thinking about who I am and my life (even though it's a perfectly fine life). I do see a counselor but I can only see the school counselor due to money issues. We are solely focused on my OCD right now, and I don't want to detract from that, since I really need to gain control over some of my rituals in order to do better at work and in school.

I really want to learn to live in reality and in the present instead of being so obsessed. It's only began to come up as an issue lately when I've got so many new responsibilities and am working on becoming independent. I guess I'm just very dependent on this fantasy world. I spend the vast, vast majority of my time daydreaming in one way or another; it's just become a normal part of my mental process and routine, so it might be really hard to get rid of. Not only that, but to be frank it brings me a lot of happiness so I don't want to stop actually having a deep interest in fiction. It's a big part of who I am, provides artistic release, has been very therapeutic and helpful at times, etc.; I just want it to stop taking over my life! It's a big mixed bag of super positive and super negative!

Sorry that was such a long description. If any of you out there have had a similar experience, what do you make of it? Thank you so much for listening! (ps my diagnoses are OCD & GAD. i thought this might fit better here because I think anxiety is one of the biggest reasons I became habituated to this maladaptive daydreaming stuff)

Dear ruru:

When I was young I had a number of dolls. I used to daydream a lot, a whole lot, from when I woke up till night. Maybe I picked the story up the next day or came up with a new one. Each daydream was very extended. The dolls were the characters and a lot was going on between them, whole conversations and scenes. It was very engaging, very helpful to me as it kept me from being aware and awake to the reality I was in. It gave me lots of pleasure as I inserted myself into the characters played by the dolls. I myself was not in the day dreams, but of course, my emotions were in the characters. It was fascinating and as I type this I feel longing for those day dreams.

I continued to day dream my whole life until a few years ago, not involving the dolls though, but making up scenes.

My understanding is similar to yours, that it is a way to calm yourself, to assert yourself, to be YOU in the day dreams when in reality you are not being yourself. It is like truly LIVING in those day dreams while reality is foggy and unclear.

Would like to correspond with you further about this if you think my experience as described so far is similar enough to yours. Let me know.

atina