What do you wish people would stop romanticizing, because you’ve lived the reality of it?

[HazelMaker]

The 1990s

Yes. It’s an insanely gendered idea.

Living « abroad ».

(Also with the implication that « abroad » is a place 🙄)

How my home city looked in the 70s/80s. It was significantly redeveloped around the turn of the century, much for the better. Yet I belong to a group for sharing memories and photos and the number of people mawkishly lamenting “I miss the old town. It had character.” Not in the (now demolished) concrete shopping centre where there were more drug dealers than decent retailers it didn’t!

The title of the thread. Also it was not my chosen path.

Ah yes, I belong to one of these groups for my home city too. People always banging on about how soulless it is now and how much better it was in the old days, and how the main shopping street is now full of druggies. They are wrong on both counts.

It was not mine either,but there is some excellent advice upthread “don’t waste the life you have thinking about the one you wanted”.

You just validated my life choices right there! 😂 I’m only partly joking. I chose not to have kids for a variety of complex reasons, partly that I’ve always suffered chronic fatigue/poor sleep alongside other health issues. Now I’m in my fifties I partly regret my choice as it would be nice now to have adult offspring, but realistically I know I couldn’t have dealt with life in the ‘trenches’ so to speak and stayed patient/parented well.

My mum’s health is also poor and I remember her being very snappy on many occasions when I was little. My dad got landed with a lot of the active parenting as sometimes she just wasn’t well enough to deal. As an adult with health problems I can now understand and empathise that it was hard for her (although, that said, she only had the one child to deal with and I wasn’t particularly unruly) but at the time I remember sometimes thinking she hated me. I couldn’t countenance doing that to a kid.

Amen to this. I’ve been juggling writing and a full time job (and v v v few non-working holidays) for a decade. And I’ve had a bestseller. It’s exhausting.

This.

Autism. Some people think that their friends, neighbours and colleagues who all have little quirks are "probably autistic" but unless you know that they suffer significant disability due to their quirks, they haven't mentioned it to you, and they haven't got or sought a diagnosis because it doesn't impact them, then they're probably not autistic.

People say "oh its a touch of the tism" whenever they like to line things up, or they want things a certain way, like it's a cute little thing to say. It's not. Imagine having your whole week up in the air, constantly panicking because Wednesdays are the days you have appointments and your latest appointment just got shifted to a Thursday, or your family said they'd be there by 10 and it's 10:15 and you're in such a state of panic you have to leave because they've set a rule they didn't adhere to but expected you to. Or you check your schedule at work and you've got a meeting in an hour but then a teams invite comes up to join a call because someone decided to bring it forward an hour because they had time, you're a key player in the delivery of the meeting and you're completely blindsided so much you physically can not speak or you overreact and risk your job and make an embarrassment of yourself. Or not being able to maintain relationships because you can't feign an interest in things others are interested in if it isn't remotely interesting to you and you don't have the development to understand emotional reciprocity so you look like a bitch if they really pay an interest in you, but you unintentionally and unknowingly don't offer them the same courtesy. Or not being able to take buses because they sometimes deviate from their designated route when there are roadworks and sometimes drivers just stop and get off for a break when you've planned a schedule and people try and talk to you when you've not scripted any conversations.

And another amen. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do, but, like a lot of writers, I have (and am lucky to have) a FT academic job with a load of particularly onerous admin running a creative writing programme (lots of overseas MA students, which means admissions is extra complex, pastoral stuff ditto, plus we rely heavily on visiting writers, writers PT teaching, and on running a speakers programme) , and my writing has to fit into the approx one third of my total work life that research does for other academics, usually much less. Yet I’m required to be productive.

I do find some of the ‘being a writer’ fantasies on here, which either feature looking out the window from a lovely garden office or doing a bit of light typing in Diane Keaton’s Hamptons house in Somethings Gotta Give, a bit maddening. They never feature being dumped by your publisher after disappointing sales, trying to manage a MFA class where searing, heavily autobiographical novels involving trauma have to be workshopped alongside sci-fi involving sentient space fungus etc.

@SpringSunshineanddaffodils

What you wrote about only children is awful and not true.

@PowderMonkeys and @cocoloco23 I wholeheartedly agree. I was a writer for several years and had some success but it was really hard work. I always smile when people say, "When I retire I'll write a book." They won't. (And there's another thing that's romanticised: having endless time to do whatever you like when you're retired!)

Paris wouldn't be somewhere I'd like to live. Couldn't be bothered with all the faff and bother, and people looking down their nose at me for not looking 'good' enough/not being 'good' enough!

And this too...

@Liveafr · Yesterday 14:46

Paris is one of the city where housing price is the highest (in the world) so the majority of parisians live in cramped appartments
Everything basically is so expensive
Very old underground, a nightmare during rush hours
Pretty dirty, though it has gotten better in the last years
Traffic in awful
Quite unsafe for women

Who'd want to live there? Maybe for 6 months, as a young single person, just to experience it, but long term? No thanks!

Should I be having flashbacks to university contract law lectures?

Being a brave, positive cancer survivor. Said as though I decided to stand up and took one for the team, and it was purely my sparkling personality that ‘beat it’ (another phrase I can’t stand!)

This (dealing with the sh*t), big time, as exemplified in my post upthread. (Tbf my parents meant to have more kids, but that wasn't to be.)

However, it's depressing to see the knee-jerk tropes about only children being paraded elsewhere on the thread. I totally accept that not all only children will have had a good experience of it, but it's really tiresome when people make these claims about how being an only child supposedly shapes one's personality in negative ways. Inevitably some people will fit the stereotype, that's how stereotypes arise. But blanket generalisations are unhelpful and insulting.

Oh gosh, how insensitive of them! Hope you're OK now.

Yep. bestsellers, awards... still need the day job. If people knew how badly it paid, I doubt we'd have so many of the 'I want to write a book' posts!

The only thing I would say about being a writer is that in most cases, you don't have to do it. Its like people romanticising a wild garden like mine. It doesn't actually bother me that they talk about it as though its all drifting around in a floaty dress and a big hat or dressed like Monty Don because its my choice to have it and I consider the bone breaking mucky effort is worthwhile.

Long baths.

But how many of these other things that are romanticised do you 'have' to do? We choose to be writers, but that's not what this thread is about - it's about how other people envision being 'an author'. So why we do it isn't in question here.

Agree.

Being told I'm not autistic because I have learned rote responses for small talk and because I'm really good at what I do.

Being exhausted to the point of sleep just trying to say and do the right thing and then trying to work out what I did or said wrong.

Being called blunt and direct because I don't know how to "soften" my words or my tone. And also not seeing why I should soften anything or not be direct.

Being told I'm a liar when it is physically extremely painful to lie about anything.

Sand
I don't like sand

I think that most of the things that have been posted are things that people couldn't avoid....like being unwell or disabled, being brought up in poverty etc; or things where its hard to get out of once you have started.....being pregnant/being a parent/being in certain jobs and so on.....but being a writer or, like me, having a wild garden is a complete choice. Unless they have an unbreakable contract, at any point a writer can say "no more". I could get up tomorrow morning and lay waste to my garden or sell the house and move into a flat. My point is if doing or not doing something is completely your choice then why would you care that people had a romanticised view of it?