You know how someone will ask, “What do you do for fun?” or “What are your hobbies?” I’ve always hated that question.
My mind doesn’t go blank because I don’t have an answer. It goes blank because there are too many possible answers, and none of them feel accurate enough.
Then I start thinking about what other people enjoy, and only very boring things come to mind. Sports. Popular TV shows. Music everyone else seems to love. I never understood why those things were supposed to be everyone’s default hobbies. The interests that seemed common never interested me.
The truth is, I have too many interests.
I don’t know how to reduce them to a simple answer. Gardening. Photography. Psychology. Cooking. Houseplants. Decorating. Terrariums. Fitness. Writing. Every one of those is true.
But claiming any one of them has always felt dishonest because I never felt like I’d earned the right to say it.
Somewhere along the way, I decided that interests had to become identities. If I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to call myself a gardener, photographer, artist, or writer, then I shouldn’t say I enjoyed those things at all.
The knitting class didn’t go well.
The pottery class didn’t go well.
I concluded that I must just be boring. That I’d somehow lost all the interests I remembered having as a child.
What happened to them?
Was this just what adulthood looked like?
It never occurred to me that maybe the problem wasn’t the hobbies. Maybe it was the way I was trying to learn them.
It also never occurred to me that I didn’t need to be an expert before I was allowed to enjoy something.
You can’t become good at something if you never let yourself be a beginner.
I’m beginning to understand that having many interests simply means it takes me longer to explore them all.
I also learn slowly.
Not because I can’t learn, but because I need to understand things from every angle. I need context. I need to know why something works before I can confidently build on it. Sometimes I can spend years doing something and still discover a new piece that completely changes how I approach it.
I tried building a terrarium about twenty years ago. I had no idea what I was doing, and it quickly died.
A few months ago, I tried again.
This time, I had something I didn’t have back then: nearly unlimited access to information. I could research every question that came up, learn from people with years of experience, and understand the reasons behind each step instead of relying on guesswork.
There are still far more things I want to learn than I’ll probably ever have time for. Adult life, full-time work, and the need to recover from everyday demands leave much less room for curiosity than childhood ever did.
But I’ve realized something important.
I never lacked interests.
I lacked permission to be a beginner.