Imagine you’re thirsty for days, your body dehydrated, your throat burning as if it has forgotten the feeling of water—and then suddenly, instead of being offered a drink, you are asked to take a lap in the Pacific Ocean.
That is how it feels, standing in the middle of the city’s most awaited, renowned book fair.
As someone shaped by words, moved by phrases—someone who keeps returning to this immaterial, intangible ink on pages that outlive us—I expected to feel at home here. Instead, I find myself uneasy, almost distressed.
Everywhere I look, there are books. Stacks stretching into rows, rows dissolving into more stacks—manuscripts, novels, hardcovers of every kind. A vast mountain of them. The kind of abundance that doesn’t excite you, but quietly overwhelms you.
But the discomfort is not just around me. It begins to turn inward.
I start noticing people—the way they move through shelves with certainty, the way they pick up books as if they already belong to them. Conversations drift past me: names of authors, titles, genres I feel I should recognize but don’t. World-famous thinkers I have never read. Bestsellers I have never heard of. Books that promise to teach you how to live, how to think, how to become something more.
And then there is me.
Standing there—not knowing enough, not having read enough, not being able to claim this space with the same ease. For a moment, it feels like I have mistaken myself for someone else. Like I have been calling myself a reader without fully earning it.
An aspiring illusionist.
Because what I seem to love is not just reading, but the idea of being someone who reads. The identity of it. The quiet prestige it carries. And in a space like this, that illusion begins to crack.
It stops feeling like a place of connection and starts feeling like something else—a kind of silent competition. Who has read more. Who knows more. Who belongs here without hesitation.
And maybe that is the deeper discomfort.
That what should have been about immersion—about slowing down, about entering one world at a time—has quietly turned into an exercise in accumulation. A need to know more, have more, be more.
And then there is the scale of it all.
This is just one book fair. Just one. There are countless others beyond this—bigger ones, louder ones, more overwhelming than this. Entire worlds of books I will never even step into.
And suddenly, the abundance doesn’t feel expansive anymore. It feels limiting.
Not in a pessimistic way. Just honestly.
Because no matter how much I crave it, no matter how much I try to build myself around it, I will never be able to hold all of it. Not even close.
And this is not just about books.
We live in a time where everything is available, all at once—a book, a podcast, a film, a lecture, an album. And even after choosing one medium, there is still an endless sea within it. The problem is no longer access. It is choice.
And choice, in excess, becomes its own kind of paralysis.
The inability to commit. The fear of missing out on something better. The quiet anxiety that whatever you choose is not enough when everything else still exists.
Standing there, in the middle of that book fair, I realize I have been trying to face an ocean all at once.
And maybe that is where I have been wrong.
Maybe the point was never to stand in the middle of everything. Not to be surrounded, not to measure myself against the scale of what exists.
Because that is what overwhelms me.
What I have been calling ambition begins to look more like a refusal to accept limits—a quiet kind of greed. A belief that I should be able to take it all in, if only I try hard enough.
But I can’t.
And maybe I don’t need to.
Maybe all I have ever really needed was a single sip.
A single book.
To sit with it. To stay long enough for it to change me—not rush past it in the illusion of knowing more, having more, being more.
Maybe immersion was never about more.
Maybe it was always about depth.
And maybe the real limitation is not out there—in the number of books or the magnitude of what exists—but here, in my own inability to accept that I can only ever enter one world at a time.