Does anybody ever step away from certain hobbies and then years later want to go back into it full swing?
I’m currently making a quilt with one of my siblings and yesterday we went to pick up some more fabric and I saw this vintage looking Halloween print. I didn’t pick it up but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since and how much I would love it if it was a button up bowling shirt (just the collar really from the bowling shirt). And well now I’m going down the rabbit hole of wanting to make clothes again.
And by again I mean when I was in third grade I had two ideas of what I was going to be when I grew up;
A teacher: was willing to do this up until my Junior year of high school when I realized I could not deal with kids or teenagers at all. And would absolutely not be able to do online schooling.
Fashion designer: I was sketching designs of clothes, looking up colleges and obsessively looking at well known fashion brands etc. Then other then wanting certain types of clothes and vibes and obsessively looking and learning the names of those clothes I basically have avoided the fashion industry for the past 10 years.
Anyways, I’m trying to convince myself that I don’t need to go get that fabric especially since I literally don’t know how to make clothes and don’t have any sewing tools. But I also know that if I go into a thrift store and see fabrics I like I’m going to start hoarding them, sketch out designs and slowly start acquiring sewing equipment which I was already planning to do to some degree as I want to make embroidery hoop art again.
While writing this I was about to change the fact that I obsessively was looking at fashion designers and brands but then I unlocked a memory of me literally doing nothing else for over four hours and I was doing this for awhile (I honestly probably did this for a minimum of a week and a half it’s all a big blur) and taking notes on it all. What 8 or 9 year old is going to those extremes on their own free will. Although, now I can say that my obsessive nature with stuff hasn’t just started within the past seven years.
Two of my favorite hobbies were photography and drawing. I used to do them all the time years ago. But then again, when I did, I didn’t have a job and had a lot of free time. Now I work full-time (and have been since 2020) and completely stopped doing them. I’ve taken some photography photos but only for special occasions like on vacation or something like that.
And as for drawing, I haven’t picked up a pencil and sketchbook since… 2018-2019. However, I’ve slowly gotten back into it but with painting instead. My sister hosts these small painting sessions with her friends that I get to be a part of. It first started out with glass art (painting on a sheet of glass) and then she started buying small canvases. I’ve gotten into it and want to paint more. It’s kind of funny to me, though, because I never considered painting since I suck at it but it’s not too bad lol. We’re having another painting session tomorrow.
Mine is less hobbies, and more hyperfixations of all kinds, which can include hobbies, but isn’t limited to them. It’s just a part of having a neurodivergent disorder (for me it’s ADHD). But yes, I cycle through hyperfixations constantly. Sometimes they last for years, sometimes only a few weeks. But occasionally I’ll come back to an old one and the fire will be rekindled. My latest one is watching my favorite gaming youtuber play survival horror video games. It had been years since I watched anything by H20Delirious, but recently I’ve been going through his channel and picking out the videos that look interesting and watching several a night.
Honestly, I might be in the same boat with the hyper-fixations I’ve been meaning to go see if I have autism for the past year but it’s just kind of a weird thing to be like “hey, I think I have this.” I did the same thing like two months ago he’s just one of those people where it’s easy to binge their stuff.
I just always called certain things hobbies because I spent so much time hyper-fixating on them that it basically would look like that to everybody else.
That sucks. But I totally get you on the painting thing for some reason going in without a sketch and just painting is so relaxing but drawing can sometimes be a nightmare and most of the time is stressful for me. But that’s also one of those things that I’m 90% sure became an issue because of the art classes I took for five years. Aka I ended up in a class full of good artist and skipped the one I was supposed to be in by my teachers request and it was very obvious to me that I was lacking skills.
I used to draw, paint, play the piano. Someday I’ll return to all those things, but right now writing is just the hardest thing ever and I need to finish this one darn book. Hopefully after that I’ll start a webcomic and get back into drawing and painting. I need a better keyboard if I’m ever going to get back to playing piano, but in the meantime I just sing or hum my compositions into the computer to record them later. I think Melody Gardot did the same thing when she was in the hospital after a car accident. Worked for her! ¯\_(ﭢ)_/¯
Piano is one. I stepped away because I went off to college, away from my piano teacher. And it was getting expensive. I’ve always wanted to go back to it because there are some pieces I want to learn to play. Some day.
Karaoke, definitely. Stopped because of the pandemic. I guess it’s not an old hobby because I didn’t lose interest. But it is in “old hobby” category now because I haven’t been to one in two and a half years or so.
I do have one hobby I jumped back into full swing—drawing, but this time in a different form. I used to draw characters in junior high and high school all the time, but stopped in college when I lost inspiration. Once I got into digital illustration 3 years ago, I started up again. Not everyday, but often enough that I was able to develop a style
I feel that. I honestly wonder if I don’t have autism too, because I’ve taken a lot of online quizzes that can’t officially diagnose you but they all say it’s a high probability, and I have friends and family with autism that I can relate to a lot and they think I may have it too. Problem is, if you are “high functioning” or weren’t diagnosed when you were a kid, it’s incredibly difficult to get diagnosed as an adult, even if you have all the signs and could benefit from treatment or compensation such as doctors notes for special help at work or anything like that. The stigma around it is so bad that people assume if you made it to adulthood without help, you are just faking it or aren’t “sick enough”. When in reality, we were just forced to cope and mask better in order to survive but it still takes a major toll on us and getting an official diagnosis and some help with it would be so much better for us.
This is exactly my issue as well. And it’s not like I didn’t struggle because I definitely ended up in some special Ed classrooms, had extra one on one sessions and had to stay after school for an extra class to help all through out Elementary. But after that I was treated as normal so I don’t know if it was a thing where I wasn’t bad enough to continue needing those classes or if I started to realize that if I masked I wouldn’t have to do all this other work.
Probably a combination of both, but who’s to say, really? All I know is that if autism and other neroudivergencies weren’t so stigmatized and it was easier to get access to help and resources for it, a lot of people would be better off.
