I don’t have time for all of my hobbies.
In fact, the more hobbies I accumulate, the less time I have for each one. It stresses me out. Which hobby do I pick? Is there any way I can exist in a different pocket of time and be able to do them all simultaneously? If only.
It’s a curse, really. I pick up things really easily, meaning I can accumulate hobbies at a breakneck speed. Recently, I accidentally taught myself some basic tailoring skills while improvising transforming a friend’s floor-length gown into a mid-length dress (which worked, to my utter surprise). While this skill hasn’t yet made it into my arsenal of hobbies, it might be only a matter of time.
There’s yet another issue with my chronic hobby-collecting: The hyperfixation. I define my hobbies not as things that I do regularly, but things that I do more than once over a longer period of time. There are instances where I can go months without touching a specific hobby, but when I do eventually remember I enjoy doing said hobby, it might be all I do for days on end, consuming me to the point where I might forget that I have some basic human functioning to do.
What makes this worse is how lately, I haven’t had time to do any of my hobbies – my life has been overrun by schoolwork, and with finals coming up, that’s not likely to end anytime soon. So all of my hobby-related energy keeps building up within me, unable to find an outlet, which should make the upcoming break rather… interesting.
However, while I can’t physically do my hobbies at the moment, I can talk about them and make them everyone else’s problem: so here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the “leisure” activities I do when I’m not English-majoring.
Reading
Surprise, surprise. The literature student enjoys reading. Who would’ve thought? However, I separate my reading hobby from my school readings based on how for school, I don’t really read fun books. The books I read in my spare time are very different from the ones I read for class, and therefore, while I am technically reading a lot while at school, I’m not reading what I want to read. Therefore, the hobby is being unfulfilled.
Reading is also the only hobby I have where I don’t take months-long breaks from it. It’s constant. While there are periods where I’m more fixated on reading than anything else and blow through three books in as many days, I never go more than a day or two without reading. I’ve been a reader for longer than I can remember, to the point where I’m fairly certain it was my first-ever hobby.
Writing
Wow, another surprise! Now, you might be thinking: Emma, aren’t you writing right now? Yes, you would be correct. However, I tend to write a lot of fiction in my spare time – plays, novels, short stories, etcetera, etcetera. I have not touched my writing notebooks in months, and my mind is suffering from it. It’s filled to the brim with random lines of prose and scenic fragments that have nowhere to go, because I have no time to put them anywhere.
Another issue is I love the planning phase. I love outlining, figuring out every little detail of a work – something I do with these articles, too. However, the more busy I get with school and extracurriculars, the more writer’s block kicks in. Hence why I’m writing this article last minute, and with no idea of where this is going, because I did not have time to sit down and make an outline. Oh, well.
Crochet
This is the newest hobby I’ve fully added into my arsenal. I bought a crochet kit at Michael’s over the summer, impulsively deciding that I was going to learn to crochet right then and there, confident that I could take on an intermediate kit right away even though I had never touched a crochet hook before (spoiler: I could not). However, I did teach myself basic crochet skills in a day, and ended up completing that intermediate kit a week later.
This is a hobby that causes hyperfixation. I once crocheted for over eight hours straight, to the point where I could not use my left hand for a couple of days because of how much I’d strained it (which is a problem, because I’m left-handed). And while I haven’t been able to crochet anything for a few months, that hasn’t stopped me from buying yarn for new projects. So the yarn builds up, and the list of uncompleted projects keeps growing.
Piano
While I’ve been playing piano since I was seven, this is one of those hobbies that consumes me entirely for a few days, then I forget my piano exists for months. Piano also didn’t become a hobby until after I stopped taking formal lessons – once I was no longer forced to practice, it didn’t feel like a chore anymore and became fun.
Now, you might be asking – are you any good? The answer is… I’m okay. The thing is, as much as I enjoy playing and can get fairly decent at some tunes, my finger dexterity – my fine motor skills – is not the best. In fact, my parents actually put me into piano because my dexterity was so bad, I struggled to use scissors (…and I still do). Therefore, my fingers do not move fast enough over the keys to play anything really complicated, and it takes me ages to learn the hand placements of a particular piece.
Singing
I discovered I could sing in high school, and it consumed me. I joined choir, and practiced obsessively at home. I took vocal lessons for a few years. When I watched Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera in tenth grade, I discovered my true vocal range, as well as my ability to communicate with tea kettles. Call me vain, but I like the sound of my own voice.
…and more
These are just my most prominent hobbies – if I named them all, we’d be here all night. Alas, here I am, collecting hobbies like Pokémon cards but unable to pursue a single one of them (no, Pokémon is not one of my hobbies). Could I consider hobby-collecting to be a hobby?
Such is the curse of a serial hobby-collector. A jack of all trades, but a master of none.