“Oh, you’re a writer? Must be nice working in your pajamas, sipping coffee, and just… thinking.”

Ah, yes, the glamorous life of a writer. The world imagines us gently tapping away at our keyboards, sunlight streaming through our windows, as we pause occasionally to gaze wistfully into the distance—perhaps contemplating life, possibly deciding between a latte and another latte. What they don’t imagine is us sitting there at 2 a.m., surrounded by half-empty coffee mugs, eyes twitching, fingers hovering over the keyboard as we mutter, “No, that sentence is garbage,” for the 47th time.

The thing about writing is that everyone thinks it’s easy until they try it. Then they realize it’s basically like doing heart surgery on yourself, with a butter knife, while blindfolded… and with people occasionally popping in to say, “So when’s your book coming out?” People assume that because writers work from home, we must be living the dream. I mean, sure, we do avoid traffic jams, office politics, and the guy who microwaves fish in the breakroom. But we also experience the existential dread of staring at a blank screen for hours, wondering if the words we wrote yesterday were inspired or if they were, in fact, the incoherent ramblings of someone slowly losing their mind to caffeine and self-doubt. And don’t even get me started on the “Oh, so you just write?” crowd. That “just” carries the same energy as “Oh, so you just cure diseases?” or “Oh, you only climb Mount Everest for fun?” Writing may look simple from the outside, but the inside of a writer’s brain is a chaos zone; part poetry, part panic, and part "what if no one reads this?"

There’s also this bizarre social phenomenon where people act slightly shocked when you tell them you’re a writer. Their eyebrows lift, they tilt their heads, and you can see the gears turning: “Ah, so you’re unemployed, but poetic about it.” Then comes the inevitable: “That’s so cool! I’ve always wanted to write a book too. Just never had the time.” Of course, you haven’t. Because writing a book isn’t something you find time for, it’s something that steals your time, eats your weekends, and replaces your social life with plot holes and self-loathing. We don’t write because it’s cushy. We write because we’re wired weirdly enough to find joy in suffering for words; to chase the perfect sentence like a cat chasing a laser pointer, fully aware it’ll never catch it but unable to stop trying.

And let’s clear something up once and for all: writing isn’t just sitting and typing. Writing is rewriting, deleting, doubting, overthinking, and occasionally Googling, “Is it normal to cry over commas?” It’s art and therapy and madness in equal measure. But we wouldn’t trade it for anything. Because for all the frustration, the self-doubt, and the caffeine-induced jitters, there’s nothing quite like that moment when it clicks; when a line sings, when a story breathes, when you realize you’ve made something out of nothing but thought. That’s the real cushy part. Not the pajamas or the coffee. The creation. So the next time someone says, “Must be nice being a writer,” smile and nod. Let them keep their illusions. Because the truth is - it is nice. It’s hard, ridiculous, soul-bending work. But nice. And besides, we’d rather be exhausted writers than well-rested accountants.