All the hobbies I've quit
And what I learned from them
Quitter’s Day falls on the second Friday in January and is, supposedly, the day when most people abandon their enthusiastically made New Year’s Resolutions. That was January 10th this year - getting on for two weeks ago, as I’m sending this - which presumably means that even more have been broken by now.
I’ve written before about how a New Year’s Resolution changed my life when, on 1st January 2013, I resolved to run a half marathon. I checked the box by completing the Great Birmingham Run in October of that year and I think it’s fair to say things got a little out of hand from there. Aside from reading, running remains the only hobby I’ver ever stuck with.
This means there are many more which haven’t stood the test of time. Hobbies which I’ve been evangelic about for a period, committed to wholeheartedly and been absolutely obsessed with, yet still ended up abandoning eventually.
And that’s… fine? We often equate longevity with success but what’s wrong with just enjoying something for a limited time? The dictionary definition of a hobby is an “activity that someone does for pleasure when they are not working”. As long as something serves that purpose in the moment, then it’s not a failure just because you’re not still doing it on your deathbed.
That’s how I’m justifying all my discarded passions, anyway. And perhaps how you can excuse yours, too. For a good time, not a long time, or however it goes. Even if hat good time only lasted until the 10th day of January.
(This isn’t to say there aren’t rewards for perseverance, obviously. If you’ve just started running then please, please, please don’t give up yet. I promise it gets much more fun once it stops feeling so hard and nothing beats the feeling of crossing a finish line that you didn’t think you’d make it too.)
To belatedly celebrate Quitter’s Day, here are some of the hobbies I’ve given up on in, in chronological order. From fashion blogging (lol, don’t) to improv comedy, climbing to hot yoga and more, I fully drank the kool-aid of all of these. I put the kit on my Christmas list (cameras! harnesses! 5 kilos of flour straight from the mill!) and bored everybody senseless raving about them before, inevitably, moving onto something else.
Fashion blogging
When: 2012
Why I started: I’d just discovered blogging and YouTube and found the community of early adopters who seemed to just post stuff on the internet and then get given free clothes. That sounds great, I thought, I could do that (while deep in debt from maxing out my credit card in Topshop).
What I learned: That just because you like buying clothes, it doesn’t mean you know anything about fashion. And that a huge amount of work goes into it before the free clothes bit.