I find it incredibly hard to not spend my free time in my bed with food, watching Netflix or looking up ice skating performances on YouTube. Now, my attention span has decreased to the size of that of a goldfish and I feel the need to scroll on TikTok every five seconds when the video I am watching does not get to the point fast enough. You might be wondering… is this how you spend most of your free time? And the answer would be… ’Yes’. Because aside from my lack of motivation to actually start with a new activity, I also have to deal with the fact that I will be mediocre at said activity because it is the first time I am ever doing it and not immediately being an amazing genius at it is therefore actually normal.
Now even though I think that being good at something makes it more fun, you usually start with something because you are interested in it, and even if you aren’t that good, through enjoyment you improve and through interest you learn a lot about yourself. I actually struggled a lot with this because I felt like I wanted to do so many things that I kind of got lost in them. Wanting to do way too much all at once made it so hard to start because I didn’t know where to start and that gave me an excuse to never actually start. For me, focussing on one thing at a time really helped.
Pursuing something just for the sake of pursuing it can be fun for some people, but oftentimes it doesn’t really work out if you don’t enjoy it. What I mean by this is that sometimes you want to try something because everyone is trying it, like me with cooking for example. Cooking is really fun to do and when I have to I actually have a lot of fun, but there was a time where I thought I could make this a hobby where I would just cook and bake at random hours of the day trying new recipes. But sometimes, burning kitchen utensils and setting off the smoke detector can be the universe’s sign to tell you that you in fact will not be the Gordon Ramsy of your generation and that’s okay too.
Hobbies are hard to start with, because even if the idea of doing something new is really great, it can still be hard to find something you actually want to stick with. Sometimes it’s even harder to find something you like or find time to do it. Just remember that time for yourself is just as important as time you spent working or in school and it’s necessary to give yourself space to enjoy it however you want. But hey, no worries, you still have a lot of time
to figure that out, so paint some portraits, bake some cakes and feed some ducks once in a while.
Author: Gauri Ghisai
Editor: Phoebe Elliott
Visuals: Rea Roitner