1. Hobbies

I’ve been thinking a lot about hobbies.

I’m sure it has something to do with the amount of time I’ve been spending inside these days, which would be laughable if it wasn’t horrific. With this abundance of time, many people I know have turned to hobbies to maintain some semblance of normalcy, of progress towards something, of marking the time. But as I’ve watched friends settle gracefully into making beautiful crafts (of which I am often a grateful recipient), I’ve felt a bit at a loss. It’s not that I don’t know what my hobbies are, it’s that they don’t feel as productive as the activities I think I should be doing. Because before I can settle into the joy of doing something, I feel first like I have to master it, or at least have it be productive, commodified-able.

This makes artistic hobbies like paining, ceramics, or knitting feel unattainable, almost like a chore. So instead, I keep coming back to the things I know I do well: cooking, fermentation, writing, reading. But for some reason, it doesn’t feel like enough to channel my creative energy this way. I keep asking myself impossible questions like “What are you drawn to?” and “What do you love?” and “How can you do more?”

I know I’m not the only person feeling the weight of unrealistic expectations, when all I want to do is curl up and stare at the television until my brain turns to mush and my eyes start to ache. Feeling like what I enjoy doing isn’t enough for ~gestures~ the world at large is a myth I’m hoping to undo here. Maybe if I write about the processes that I go through when I’m playing in the kitchen, I’ll actually recognize that I’m tapping into the same creativity and artistic expression I see in my friends’ crafts. At the very least, I’ll have some recipes to show for my efforts.

I did a little digging into the etymology of the word “hobby.” It ultimately comes from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning “to bend.” And I’ve been sitting with how our hobbies, in place of the activities that might normally sustain us if we weren’t living through a pandemic, allow us to bend ourselves into this impossible moment we’re living through. How we are endlessly able to twist and turn a horrible situation into something beautiful.