I have come to the abrupt, chilling realization that I no longer have any hobbies. I was staring at a blank screen to start this assignment, and this understanding crashed into me like a wave: I am so incredibly boring. I wasn’t always like this, which is what makes this so alarming. Where did those interests go? I filled my college applications with after-school activities and hobbies and things that generally consumed my every waking hour. Now, my days are spent attending lectures, eating silent meals in the dining hall, returning to my on-campus apartment to sit on the couch, in wordless companionship with my roommates as we simultaneously complete hours of homework. 

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The closest things I have to hobbies these days are reading and writing, but how can these be my hobbies when these are also what I am in school for? My academics cannot possibly be my whole life, can they? So I took a trip down memory lane, reminiscing about every hobby I ever picked up, trying to place where and how things went so wrong.

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As a kid, I tried every sport accessible to me. My parents put me in ballet at age three, which lasted until not even my fourth birthday. My kindergarten soccer career was going well until I got scolded for sitting in the middle of the field picking flowers. After a friend brought me to her gymnastics bring-a-friend day, I stuck around for a few years, but I was too scared to do flips on the trampoline, and my legs never stayed straight on my cartwheels.

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Cheerleading took up a few years in elementary school, but I hated being out in the cold and I hated everyone staring at me from the bleachers as I twisted and turned and shook my hips. My few years in basketball were practically a joke, my parents confessing to me later on that they had talked about subtly suggesting I quit because I ran away from the ball instead of towards it. They let me keep going until I asked if I could stop. I tried out tennis for one summer but ended up quitting before the end of the sessions because it was too hot outside and my serves never made it over the net. 

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Softball had strong potential, that is, until seventh grade when I got hit straight in the face by a fly ball all the way in the outfield and realized that if I couldn’t figure out glove placement after eight years of the sport, maybe it wasn’t for me. As I recovered from my softball injury, unable to move my mouth after getting fifteen stitches in my upper lip, I avoided going to the rest of my games, even if it was just to sit on the bench. I hated how it felt to know that all of those girls on my team witnessed the humiliation of me getting absolutely demolished by the ball. So when sign ups came around in eighth grade, I told my parents I was done.

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I thought I was done with sports for good, but I tried out one more once I got to high school. I joined the fencing team because it was the one sport you could join with no experience. My friends and I showed up to the first practice with no idea how to hold a weapon, let alone use it. Four years later, I was a Varsity athlete. Absurd. But I finished my senior season and proceeded to never pick up my Epée again. 

 

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I took two years of piano lessons, but my fingers never quite stretched an octave, making it hard for me to play anything above a beginner’s level. I started playing violin in fourth grade and continued until my freshman year of high school. In eighth grade, I was second violin, sitting right in the front row, playing loud and proud, but when I got to high school and I was the worst musician in the whole orchestra, I was discouraged. My teacher wasn’t great at teaching. She would leave us in the classroom while she did whatever she did in her office. During the concerts, I would keep my bow hovering above the strings, never quite playing. I would walk off the stage on the verge of tears, embarrassed at how little I cared about the instrument that just a few months prior I loved. 

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Quitting orchestra, however, gave me the opportunity to join the marching band. I fell in love with the community of it, how my fellow pit members felt like family. I didn’t march, opting instead for front ensemble, learning the ins and outs of marimba and xylophone. By senior year, I was pit captain, teaching freshmen how to hold their mallets and leading the green team to victory during team challenges in band camp. I knew I wasn’t going to pursue marching band in college. UMass is known for its marching band. They practice 24/7. They know what they’re doing. And I didn’t. My high school’s band was small. Our music was fairly simple, especially by my senior year, since the band suffered from such low membership. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the pit percussionists at UMass. I knew I wouldn’t be good enough. So I put away my mallets, threw away my sheet music, and I never picked up an instrument again. 

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I did an after school ceramics program for two years in middle school. I joined mostly to hang out with the art teacher because she was the coolest person in the school. Once I took a look around my house, cluttered with my horribly unsymmetrical pottery pieces from years of pretending to be an artist, I decided that I couldn’t do that to my parents anymore, so I stopped bringing art home. 

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I did Girl Scouts for 13 years, which led to the usual outdoor type hobbies: hiking, camping, archery, nature arts and crafts. My arrows never hit the target, and I never had the right kind of hiking boots, mud seeping through my sneakers and staining my socks. 

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My friend and I signed up for a summer enrichment cooking class at our middle school in sixth grade. We were just doing it for something to do, but I ended up falling in love with cooking and baking. Baking was therapeutic for me, following the recipe to a T and knowing that it would taste good no matter how it looked on the outside. It got me through the early Covid-19 quarantine. But of course, right after I started my freshman year of college, my family’s oven broke. It was like some kind of cruel joke. I finally was enjoying something for myself and the universe just couldn’t have that. 

 

If my future ends up how I want it to, I will ideally be reading and writing every day for a career, and I don’t know how I’m going to stay sane if my only hobbies are also my job. In tracing my life through the hobbies I’ve started and stopped, over and over again, since I was only a kid, I was hoping I’d find some kind of magic answer as to why I didn’t seem to like sticking to hobbies. Instead of some outside reason for why I’d stopped playing all of those sports, stopped playing music and doing art, instead, I saw how I stood in my own way time and time again. 

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I can’t help but recall something that my mom said to me about a year ago. She told me that I’m not good at being bad at things. In the moment, admittedly, I got very defensive and insisted that that wasn’t true. How could it be? I’m bad at so many things, there’s no way that I haven’t gotten used to that feeling by now. But after listing over fifteen hobbies that I quit once realizing that I was bad at them, I think maybe she was right. 

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I never meant to stop playing music or making art or baking. I just hated the pressure of having to be good at it. Hobbies are supposed to be fun. But so what if my clay pots were lopsided? So what if I was the worst musician in a 50-person orchestra, or a 300-person band? So what if I couldn’t decorate cakes the way they do on TV? Tomorrow, I could wake up, throw some flour and sugar and butter in a bowl, toss it in the oven, and call it a cake. I could take a hike in sneakers. I could use watercolors to paint the most horrific sunset the art world has ever seen. I could find my violin, play a scale horrifically out of key, and that could be enough. And even more importantly than being able to do these things, I think I want to do them. 

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I spend an afternoon scrolling through the “Violinist” subreddit. I research electronic tuners and find free PDFs of beginner’s sheet music. I call my mom and ask her to make sure my violin is still in the spare closet. I find old pictures of me at middle school concerts, remembering the joy that I felt as my months of practice paid off. 

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When I pick up my violin for the first time in seven years, I’m going to be bad at it, and it’s going to be fun. I’m going to forget which string is which. I’m going to play an F instead of an F#. I’m going to lose my resin and play without it, destroying my bow. I’m going to miss half of the sixteenth notes that I attempt. I’m going to screech my way through Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and I’m going to revel in every minute of imperfection.