Rediscovering Old Hobbies

I used to practice a variety of hobbies before school and other… things robbed me of my time. Recently, I’ve been playing with the idea of giving them all a shot again.

I used to cycle a lot as a child, but since moving to Austria, I have cycled maybe twice or thrice (in ten years). I had to leave my bicycle behind because it wouldn’t have fit on a plane and I never dared buy one here because I feared I wouldn’t get to use it much. I was dirt poor, too, so that factored into the decision not to buy one. But now I want to bite the bullet and get one, even if there is no one to bike with me.

When I was eleven, I was so into knitting. I used to make all kinds of things, from phone covers to hats to simpler items like scarves. My mom and grandma were both avid knitters, but they weren’t half as enthusiastic about teaching me how to knit (seeing as I’m a boy) as I was about learning that skill. I ended up learning how to knit at school, but soon after stopped knitting, in part because of the stigma, but also because of school taking up most of my time.

Now that I have internalized the I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude which should’ve happened long ago, I would very much like to explore knitting and crocheting again. I plan on making myself a hood to complement my olive green scarf. After that, I would like to make some accessories to place on my desk. Nothing fancy, though. If I feel like it, I might get into embroidery, too, but this is already getting too ambitious so I need to focus on doing at least knitting or crocheting before venturing out further.

The last old hobby that I’m eyeing, but the least likely for me to get into again, is playing guitar. This one’s wound is still somewhat fresh as I began playing guitar three years ago and stopped one and a half years ago. At the time, it was supposed to be an outlet for my emotions, but that flopped so badly. I wanted to get an electric guitar, however, because of how relatively small our apartment is, I decided against getting one because I had no space for it so I bought an acoustic guitar instead.

Anyway, I started attending classes, although I never found joy in practicing so I never got better and thus felt it was futile with me, even though I hadn’t even tried. These days the guitar is collecting dust in some closet and I haven’t touched it since my last year in high school. Picking it up again is going to hurt, as in physical pain. It took months for me to get used to pressing my fingers on the strings. This is the main deterrent at the moment.

With all of these abandoned hobbies on one hand and my current ones on the other, I’m wondering how I will balance those out with my studies, especially if I do end up taking on a second degree next to my current one. I’ve always used the argument of lacking time to refrain from partaking in various activities, but as I’ve noticed recently, I’d rather sort through files multiple times over when I don’t know what else to do (it satisfies my OCD1) than do something fun that requires even a little bit of thinking in advance.

This time around, I’m serious and I’d very much like to get back into at least two out of the three listed above. Knitting is easy to get back into because I already have what’s necessary. Except for yarn, but that is easy and inexpensive to procure, though I don’t know about the other two. We’ll see.

  1. Not in the colloquial sense; I have diagnosed OCD ;) ↩︎