For all those reading less and less as we grow older and our vision loses focus (not to mention the curious, particular, personal handicaps and burdens we all carry): you are not alone.
Federal Data on Reading for Pleasure: All Signs Show a Slump | National Endowment for the Arts.
Do you mean that at one time you would have opposed gender affirming surgery for anyone? I don’t know that my daughter, who is also a trans woman, would have had an issue with it at any point in her life; the older woman who often greeted us at the door when we got to church was trans, and our kids thought highly of her.
When I was young I envisioned a life of travel and adventure, and whatever work I’d be doing would be outdoors, in conservation or somesuch. My first career was a mapmaker, so that had me on the right path - a lot of fieldwork. I would never spend my days with my fingers tapping a keyboard and blinklessly staring at a screen.
Lo and behold, I got married, got a dog, got a house, got a couple of kids and a SAHM - the trappings of a solid suburban existence - all looking to me for support. As a matter of convenience and security I stepped into roles and jobs that paid more, but we’re more and more desk-bound. And that’s how I spent the bulk of my working life - as a cubicle-dwelling corporate drone doing unfulfilling and forgettable work. By hey, I took care of my family and home.
Now that I am rolling-up on retirement (hopefully within the next 3-5 years), I have started to travel more, with the resources and bits of time to do it as rough or as comfortable as I want, so the there’s that (even though with less vigor). Being active and outside was in me all the time, but smothered by the shackles of responsibility. Now that many things have eased I am getting back to me, but my younger self would have been shocked at how I became just a paycheck and drifted through the last 25 years.
When I was a kid I said I wanted to quit school at 16 and be a ditch digger. Instead I had a long career as a librarian.
No, of course not. It was the furthest thing from my mind. I was using surgery as a psychological metaphor, not literally. Though I can see how confusion might arise once the word “surgery” is introduced. I was trying for a metaphor to convey how delicate it felt to open up a new life without upsetting several applecarts.
Do you mean that you would at one time have opposed apple pie? No, that was just a metaphor.
Your daughter is very lucky compared to what I went through.
I’ve lived with it since childhood and I’m still lousy at coping with it. No question, short-form/social media exacerbates it. When I was a kid, the only thing remotely comparable was television, and I was not an obsessive TV watcher. My ADHD manifested mostly as spending hours and hours absorbed in reading and writing - to the exclusion of everything else. I’m predominantly innatentive, which I like to describe as, “the distraction is coming from inside my own head.”
Now living with ADHD is a veritable hellscape of constant distraction. Everything’s worse. My working memory is shot. I go to remove a dish from the dishwasher and end up staring into my open freezer, wondering what the hell I’m doing. I still read, but rarely more than an hour. And that’s leaving aside my massive struggle with task initiation.
I suspect there are a lot of people who would otherwise be subclinical whose executive function weaknesses are exploited by our modern context. I don’t think cell phones caused my ADHD but they sure as hell make it worse.
Ok, I misunderstood. Symbolism often goes over my head. Yes, my daughter is lucky to have grown up in a progressive part of the country and to have had a supportive family, extended family, and community.
I went the other way. For much of my life I was an atheist, but in my forties met LDS Missionaries and am now a High Priest. I don’t know if my younger self would feel betrayed but I’m sure he would have been flabbergasted.
You might find this current thread interesting. in fact you might usefully contribute to it if you’re so inclined.
Another book person! I loved reading and could never part with any of my books. I had a dream of someday living in an old home with a library, where I could keep all of my books. Well, that never happened, and all of my books ended up in boxes. One day I thought to myself, even if I had a library, why would I want all of these books I’ve already read? I don’t like reading books more than once. So I’ve been slowly getting rid of my books in rummage sales. I sold a whole box of Stephen King books that I loved. Once they were gone, I wasn’t bothered. One less box in my basement. Now everything I read is on my Kindle or is an audio book from Libby.
Interesting observation. Not unlike how many lottery winners end up flat broke several years after winning. They have no notion of how to manage large sums of money. It’s entirely outside the realm of their experience.
I went the other way to you! I grew up as a 6th generation Mormon and Mormonism was the core of my identity until high school. It was the single most important thing in my life and my identity.
I went on a mission to Japan, but then left in my 20s.
Now I’m an atheist.
My father died before I had publicly left and I wasn’t the first of my siblings to go. My mother is unhappy that four of her five children are out.
This reminded me of another area for me: renaissance faires.
I started going to the local ren faire (which was “King Richard’s Faire,” on the Wisconsin/Illinois state line) when I was in college, and would go once a summer. After I got out of grad school, I fell in with a group of friends who actually worked at the faire – they owned a blacksmith shop at what had been King Richard’s, and was now the Bristol Renaissance Faire.
I became a full-on rennie: I spent pretty much every summer weekend during the ‘90s working at my friends’ blacksmith shop, and we visited other faires in the Midwest and East Coast. I had a bunch of costumes – both more functional ones for working at the shop, and some fancier ones for fun (as well as several theatrical/costume swords).
My friends sold their shop after the '98 season, because they were expecting a child, and were burned out after nine seasons as faire merchants. For a while, we’d still go up to Bristol at least once a season, but that tapered off, and about 10 years ago, I stopped going at all. It was a huge part of my life there for a decade, and now, it’s something that I’m just not interested in anymore.
I have always been creative. Since I was very young I was drawing pictures, writing stories, doing silly voices, reading books, acting on stage, making movies, animating, visual effects, it was all cartoons, comic books, puppets, all the time.
I am burned out. So little of what I made got any positive reaction from people that it constantly discouraged me from any path I thought I wanted to go down, until it got to the point that I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. I would like to believe that if I had infinite time and money after retirement I’d get back into some of the things I liked, but I doubt I actually would.
So the creative ball of energy I once was has definitely died off.
This what people have to realize about doing a creative hobby like drawing and writing.
Doing the hobby for yourself is fun.
Start doing it for other people can suck all the joy out of it and make you want to quit.
Exactly - I read a couple of posts about people getting rid of books and I kind of couldn’t understand why they thought getting rid of their physical books was a betrayal of their former self until I saw your post. Because I spent most of my life with hundreds of books in the house. Maybe a thousand. I didn’t have them because I was collecting them or for decor - I had them because I bought them and I kept them in part because I wanted to always have books around to read in case I couldn’t get to the library and in part because I might want to re-read one. Now, I have maybe 50 books and 20 or so I haven’t read because I bought them on my last trip to the bargain bookstore. I still read just as much - it’s just ebooks and online newspapers and magazines instead of print. For multiple reasons - first, because it’s easier for me to read since I can adjust the font and there is no glare when I read magazines, etc and second, because I can carry hundreds of books on a kindle. I would only feel I betrayed my younger self if I stopped reading.
Here’s a post by me from a couple months ago in a sorta similar thread that makes the same point a little differently. There’s more discussion by others in the next few posts.
Re-reading a bit more of that thread, it’s interesting how much overlap in the stories told from a very different OP.
I was deeply religious as a teenager, probably to the point of being OCD about it. Not diagnosed, but I’m not saying that lightly. There were nights I’d be in bed crying because I thought I did something that couldn’t be atoned for, so I was going to Hell. I was a very sheltered kid. In hindsight, hadn’t done a thing worth feeling that guilty about. Exposure to other views in college both toned down the religious fervor, then ended in me leaving religion behind.
I used to love to keep up to date on the news. I wanted to be as informed as possible. I don’t have the energy to pour into things like that anymore. I’m not wholly uninformed, and I’m always going to vote when the opportunity arises, but it’s okay and better for my mental health if I don’t immediately learn about some kidnapping on the other side of the country or about every stupid thing that comes out of certain people’s mouths.
Young me -
“I don’t care, all I need is a roof over my head, a tent will do”
Old me -
“Liar”
Thankfully, old me is very happy in his new home.
I hated school, to the point of feigning illness fairly often. I didn’t like undergraduate either, but liked menial labor less. Then I wanted to be a librarian, so that meant grad school. I was done then, or so I thought. After 15 years of mostly working in public libraries I got a chance to try being a school librarian. I did that for 20 years before retiring last year. Now I’m working as a substitute teacher. That said, I still wouldn’t want to be a student again. I’ve had to take classes to keep up my certification and mostly found them excruciating. Fortunately the rules were changed to exempt anyone with a good enough evaluation to forego continuing ed.