#15: An inventory of joys
What do you do when all you have is "free time"?
I.
One thing I’m starting to realize about myself is that writing was never a hobby to begin with. It wasn’t one of those things that my parents would always find me doing growing up, not an activity I would necessarily “look forward to” in my free time. No one ever saw me, as a kid at an adult party, just making stuff up on a piece of paper in a corner. I never really made stuff up I think, beyond cute scenarios of my crush liking me back, which is truly very on brand. From the beginning, writing was a necessity. It was a tool I’d discovered that, when put into use, gave me inexplicable release, a feeling that must have been so comforting that I wanted to access again and again.
By “the beginning” I mean seventh grade English class, which would require us to turn in the occasional essay and book report. While I dragged my feet through the latter, something felt different about those essays. I must have simply talked about myself in them (also very on brand), and it felt good enough as an exercise that I eventually thought: “Wow, okay, I could do this when I grow up. I could be a writer.” A clear and conscious decision that I gladly pledged my loyalty to.
Come to think of it, it is really so unserious how I, as a 34-year-old with a LinkedIn account, beat myself up day in day out trying to commit to this random idea that I had made on a random Wednesday afternoon at the young age of 13. Surely I did not have to do it? Surely I do not have to trust a kid with a barely developed frontal lobe so much? (I actually know nothing about the development of frontal lobes, so don’t come at me). And yet I did. Clearly I still do because here I am still writing about writing in a newsletter where I kinda swore I would stop doing that.
What I’m saying is, while I love writing, I don’t think I’ll ever find pleasure in its process, the way I think you are supposed to with hobbies, and that’s OK. I can get better, and I want to, but I don’t think getting better at writing will allow me to enjoy the process any more than I do now. It was never truly delightful. There was never a time where I wrote freely. Never knew of a period in a past life where I wrote like nobody's watching (maybe those book reports, actually). I stopped consistently writing a diary after middle school over fear someone might read them.
Writing became important to me before I could ever properly derive joy from it. I approached it with so much intention and seriousness — a reverence, almost, which may not necessarily be misplaced but clearly comes with so much self-imposed expectations. I used to want so bad for writing to be fun and feel good, but I’m slowly accepting that it never will be! Maybe it’s never meant to be! At least not for me. Two decades since deciding I was going to become a writer, the one true joy is really in having written.
II.
I’ve cultivated new interests in my adult life that have expanded my world in a way my 14-year-old self would’ve never imagined. At first I thought of them as hobbies, little sparks of joy while scrolling and contributing to the noise of social media. Little curiosities that I could learn to do something useful with my time. Things that could maybe become great life skill for when I leave civilization and join a commune/cult, whichever gets on my FYP first. But then I started thinking about these things too hard and too seriously that I suspect they, too, have stopped qualifying as something I do purely out of pleasure. If writing was necessity, these things are curiosity.
My relationship with clothes, getting dressed, sewing, and by extension shopping (lol), falls under this category. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve always been interested, perhaps even from a younger age than 13, but I simply denied myself that path because I was busy being A Writer. (I’m thinking of that time in sixth grade I told myself I’d strictly wear red for a week in the name of establishing a personality.) Thinking about and making clothes stopped qualifying as mere hobby because while I derive a great deal of pleasure from them, I also think about them with this funny concoction of anger and annoyance — the good kind — that I can feel growing in the pit of my stomach. They’ve become at once a delight and a bone that I want to pick with the world. Does that make sense? (I’m trying to “free write” so this might all be nonsense.) Of course there is joy here, too, but the joy feels more utilitarian. The kind of joy you feel when you get close to answers, or you realize you’re asking the right questions.
III.
Music is probably the closest thing I have to a hobby. I’m not excellent at it, but I’m also not terrible. For two years in a row now I’ve written “sing better” in my annual goal setting page on Notion. It’s an embarrassing thing to admit but it’s true. This year I added “play the violin better” to that list. I’m okay enough on the piano to not hate the sound of my playing, but even on that, the room for improvement remains substantial.
There’s an essay in my head about rediscovering my love for music that I’m not gonna get into here and now, but I’ve spent a great deal of time these past two years wondering why I ever thought I had to stop playing just because I stopped going to church. Heck I started going to church again this year partly to investigate that question. Unlike the things I mentioned earlier, my relationship with music is free of the burden of being correct or even being great. Devoid of that burning passion to problem-solve. Any desire to improve is based solely on the desire to enjoy myself more. To hear myself screech less on the violin. To truly get to know the range where I feel freest to sing a tune. To brave the higher keys that I tended to avoid. Maybe even to sing and play an instrument at once, because that must feel so good to do!
Music is perhaps the only thing I don’t mind being “just okay” at. I can suck and laugh at myself. I can play the same song imperfectly over and over and over again without getting frustrated, regardless how many wrong turns I take. At 13, it would always take some reprimanding from my parents to get me to practice. But at 34, fully-developed frontal lobe and all, I am able to appreciate repetition as a means of developing muscle memory.
Most recently, I’ve been obsessed with doing Billie Eilish’s “L’amour De Ma Vie” on the piano. I sound nothing like her, but what a gift it still is.