Hobbies are Saving my Life
How plants, scissors and glue, duolingo, reading and hula hoops are making me a more holistic human.
Yesterday I was writing a letter to a friend (sorry if you read this, friend, I’m about to spoil your letter) when I launched into a giant paragraph about healing from burnout. It’s 280 days since I bottomed out - incidentally this is just about the length of the average human pregnancy. It’s four months since I decided on an end date to leave my job (I’m not leaving my job - you can read about here - but apparently I needed to really give myself permission to do so). We are on the front edge of the giant wave of people and activity that make up Summer Reading program, the FY 24 budget is days away from being finalized, the summer temperatures are rising and this week I shoveled human feces. My life has not in any way become less stressful or surprising.
And yet, when I compare right now me to last year me (thank you 5-year one-line diary) the differences are profound. Last summer me was deeply unhappy, deeply burned out. My life is no less busy and my work is no less stressful, but what I have gestated over the last 9 months is a new understanding of myself. I’m not cliche enough (or smart enough to figure out how to put the correct accent on that ‘e’ ) enough to say I’m a whole new me. I am a more layered and nuanced me. I am a me with more self-care skills and self awareness, and a deeper understanding of active rest and the hobbies which serve to restore my equanimity. I am a person with much more than a career that defines me. The last may be the most apparent and pivotal change for me.
Something I have come to realize about myself, and which I believe can be extrapolated to much of humanity, is that I have a tendency to over identify with a single aspect of my life. When you’re part of evangelicalism, this trait is encouraged, or in my case, many cases, dictated. YOU ARE A CHRISTIAN and nothing else about who I was or what I thought mattered. Unfortunately, this hyperfixation of identity is so, so, so fragile because when the thing, whatever it may be, changes or, worse, is taken away, we collapse in ourselves. We don’t know who we are. I experienced this the first time I was kicked out of church. I was willing to twist my identity in whatever way was necessary to be “back on the inside" and for a long time I did exactly that.
Fortunately, by my second ejection I had so disassociated my identity from christianity that being allowed to move on was a relief, but I didn’t learn to do better, I just replaced one thing with another. Our second excommunication coincided with the beginning of my library career and thus, a new hyperfixation was born. This worked great for awhile. I love the open-mindedness of libraries, their mission of inclusion, their dedication to empowering people through information and services. These are worthy things to incorporate into an identity. In fact, I like them so much I still claim them as part of my identity.
The mistake I made, the mistake so many make, is that I didn’t take any time to define the person I am beyond the scope of my work. I mean, isn’t that the first thing we ask someone when we meet them? What do you do? Nine months into this recovery journey, I’m firmly convinced that the reason people can’t stop working at home in the evenings and on weekends, or whenever their home hours are, is because they don’t know who they are if they aren’t working. We get bored because we haven’t taken the time to discover what we like to do when no one is telling us what we should be doing, where we should be going or otherwise co-opting our time. We don’t know what we like, what we’re good it - or could improve on with practice- and we don’t make time to explore these things. We, as a culture, believe that doing things for pleasure is either selfish or self-indulgent and not a productive use of our time.
I’m not immune to this kind of thinking, even now after so much effort to understand myself better. Maybe it sounds silly to say that hobbies are profoundly changing my life, but they are, and I’m having a marvelous time in the process.
But I am learning. I’m exploring and playing. Today as I drove home from an emergency syrup run (blueberry french toast and not enough syrup is a legit catastrophe), I found myself alone in the car making zoom noises as I rounded the curves in our neighborhood, and I cracked up laughing for doing something so silly, but I didn’t stop zooming the whole way home. I’m enjoying my work more because I’m enjoying my SELF more, and that is possible because I’m taking the time to grow and learn who I am, what I love. How I earn my living is only a tiny fraction of that, and if it went away tomorrow, I would be sad, but not devastated. I wouldn’t question my worth or wonder who I am now.
It seems I’m always finding something to be passionate about and currently it’s finding new ways to enjoy myself, and new patterns of active rest that feed my need to be challenged and grow, while also restoring my peace of mind and soul. I find the more ways I have to enjoy myself, the more resilient I am to the daily and often unexpected stress that life throws at me. Perhaps it seems I bang this drum too much, but I’m firmly convinced that so many of us, myself included, are making the mistake of believing that life is stressful because we aren’t managing it correctly. When really, life is stressful. Period. It can’t be predicted or controlled. It can only be lived as it comes. But we may be able to enjoy the ride more when we know ourselves rather than allowing what we do to define us.
I share quite a bit here about the hobbies, rituals and routines which are sustaining me, but I’m not writing a prescription for everyone or even anyone. The maddening truth of this journey of self-discovery is that no one else can do it for me, and no one else has a set of instructions that will also work for me. I know what I know about myself because I invested time, opening myself to possibility. I made myself vulnerable - an often terrifying state of being - to disappointment and failure, and then found that neither of those things are as awful as I anticipated. I listened and learned, and taught my inner voice new messages to repeat to myself. I probably look foolish a lot of the time, but I’m out of eff’s for anything but my own opinion of myself.
Yes, I do think some of this is a result of reaching the glorious age of fifty. Experience can be a wonderful teacher, but most of it is because I allowed myself to let go of imagining the worst that could happen, and began to anticipate the best. I’m worth the investment and it’s paid off in so many lovely ways I never would have anticipated.
Thank you for sharing. When I left teaching I told people I had to detox from the job and its ever increasing demands on time and energy. I like your phrasing better. And yes it’s hard to break away from the working-all-the-time mentality.