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I have an unproductive habit of dropping interests after many months (or few weeks) of investing into them. Over the years this includes: film photography, cut and sew clothing, reselling sneakers, competitive TF2, music production, video essays, skateboarding, electric guitar, pixel art, and creative coding (still trying to commit to this one). I'm stuck in a catch-and-release cycle diving for one shimmering glow after the other as they float by on a temporal breeze, only for me to momentarily toy with the spark before I let it go again. I'm certainly guilty of trying to start with the end state in mind, longing to produce the alluring music, art, clothing, all these creations that are meticulously crafted with a dense repertoire of skills refined day after day. As I veiled my eyes with unpossessed works, I lost sight of the fact that I actually have to be working on these interests consistently, practicing in order to get better to attain that caliber of creation. I remained blind to the obvious: you don't get better at something by skimming the surface and looking/reading/thinking about it a lot, you actually have to dip yourself into the fire and repeatedly get burned. There's no hidden shortcut to the end, and talent is often mistaken for focused effort.
Still, it's fun to fantasize. To imagine all the different archetypes your life may unfold into if only you had just committed harder into painting, or making clothes, or playing music. Dreaming is a catalyst to the excitement that puts you on the path you decide to take.
It's when that initial excitement, that upswing starts to lessen and you realize the sheer mountain of work that lays ahead of you, the gap between where you are and where you want to be nestles itself deep into your psyche. You understand just how vast the chasm is before you even get close to actualizing the dream. And that's when you start losing the excitement. When work feels like work and tapping a bit longer on the keyboard or carving out another piece feels like swinging a sledgehammer into a dense rubber ball. When no progress is made despite earth-shattering degrees of effort. It's in these circumstances that persistence is afraid, it wavers and trembles.
This hesitation translates into the scattered residue of past interests, as we come to terms with the reality that some passions lack a destiny to become a focal point in our future. Scattered rolls of film on the desk, derelict software, old posts on unused art accounts. We all have worn trails, breadcrumbs sprinkled in the most likely places that reveal the lives we have tried to live out. The dreams we thought could be our calling, the misguided and now dust-laden pursuits dropped for one reason or another. And sure, it’s kind of sad to consider the truth that we may not become the crowd-filling musician, or the seemingly unending well of academic research. The international scope of aspiration shrinks each time our ability and the luck we encounter face off. We get more realistic.
It’s because of this it can be startling for some (I know it was for me) to stumble across those individuals who had some magnetic endeavor that they knew they would undertake ever since they were kids. You know the ones — the prodigy pianists, the star child-athletes, the math savants. To me it didn't matter if they ended up being the absolute best in the world, from my uninformed perspective I deeply admired that they knew what to focus on year after year (which is different than if they loved what they did, but still). I was never like that. I had to keep trying on lots of shapes and patterns that never seemed to fit quite right, attempting to justify to myself that I'm truly invested in getting great at what I wanted to do at the moment. I didn't get how people could stick with something self-directed. I always hit a wall where no amount of mental gymnastics could force me to rationalize the continuation of things once they got difficult or boring to pursue. I am a terminal sufferer from shiny object syndrome, the perpetual seeker of the next contrived destiny to embark on.
It took me a while to discern that I was already doing a bunch of things that naturally consumed my free time. They were hidden from me for so long because I was convinced they weren't the most appropriate things to do with my life: modding Skyrim, reading series after series, making pointless little things. I still get reminded all the time by family that I should grow up and move on from the games, the childhood interests, the apparent time-wasters that don't translate into making money. However, once I gained the awareness that I can actually continue to do these things and make them even more important in my life I was filled with a new sense of clarity in a world that previously rang incessant disorienting bells in my head. My most futile interests morphed into the defining themes of my current life as I saw I could just delve deeper into stuff I instinctively acted on and observe the (generally positive) aftereffects that materialized (monetary or not).
Like transitory interests, I find that many I know are quick to advance onward, to shed off old selves like modern-day serpents, leaving behind fragmentary pasts and the diversions that came along with them in search of a new self. There's a mad dash to board the next flight to Brooklyn to live aesthetic lives, to sprint off to med school, to carve the way in uncharted startups, to become that well-respected academic. All cool, perfectly viable options of course. But before you book that ticket, I would perhaps consider what you have left lying around: scraps of sketches, piles of books, untouched instruments. You might forget to bring along an important piece of you.