What happens when a woman who spent 20 years being productive realizes she might need to do things for absolutely no reason?
I have recently decided I need a hobby. This sounds like a very normal thing for a grown woman to decide, except I’ve realized I’m not sure I know how to have one anymore.
Somewhere between raising kids, working, teaching fitness, podcasting, writing, keeping a house running and remembering the approximately 4,000 tiny details that come with being a wife and mom, I think I forgot how to do things because they’re fun. Most things I do have some sort of purpose attached to them. I work out because I want to be strong and healthy, I walk because it’s good for me and helps clear my head, I read because I love it, but also because I’m usually highlighting something, learning something or thinking about how it relates to something I’m writing. Even the things I enjoy somehow become productive.
Recently, I tried one of those dot art projects. You’ve probably seen them online. Someone is sitting peacefully at a table, carefully placing tiny dots onto a canvas while soft music plays and sunlight pours through the window. It looks incredibly relaxing and meditative, and I thought maybe this could be my new thing. I don’t think I lasted ten minutes.
Instead of feeling relaxed, my brain immediately started wandering, I couldn’t get the little dot or crystal thing on the tip of the thingy it’s supposed to go on, then I the paper was super stickey and I hated how it felt (UGH big sigh.) I wondered whether I should check Instagram, then I remembered an email I hadn’t answered, then I started thinking about something in the house I wanted to organize, somehow dinner entered my mind, even though dinner had absolutely nothing to do with the tiny dots sitting in front of me. I was supposed to be relaxing, yet my brain was already searching for the next thing to accomplish.
It made me realize that maybe I’ve forgotten how to be a beginner at something, or even how to be bad at something and keep doing it anyway. When we were kids, we did that constantly. We made friendship bracelets that fell apart, learned dances in our bedrooms, drew bubble letters all over our notebooks, made collages out of magazines and painted our nails approximately fourteen different colors. We didn’t need to be talented at any of it. Nobody was asking us whether it was productive or whether we could monetize it. We just did things because they were fun. I learned to ski when I was little but didn’t learn to snowboard until I was around 19 or 20 and it was harder to learn but still I kept trying. Somewhere along the way I think I lost my patience for myself too. But the funny thing is, I didn’t lose patience for others, only myself.
I feel like adulthood turned everything into a performance review. Even our hobbies have goals now, we don’t just go for a walk; we track our steps, we don’t just read books; we set yearly reading goals, we don’t just exercise; we track our workouts, heart rate, recovery and progress. We don’t just journal; we have prompts, systems and morning routines. God forbid you decide you want to bake bread. Give it three weeks and you’ll have a sourdough starter with a human name and find yourself researching Dutch ovens at midnight.
I don’t want another thing to optimize, I think I want something pointless.
Maybe I’ll finally learn mahjong., maybe I’ll paint, maybe I’ll try knitting, although I have a feeling I could become irrationally angry at yarn. Maybe I’ll start doing puzzles. Maybe I’ll pull out actual magazines, scissors and a glue stick and make a vision board while sitting on my bedroom floor listening to music. Maybe start going to an adult dance class, I actually did dance when I was a kid and I was actually pretty good at it. I want more things in my life that don’t need to produce anything at the end.
The more I think about this, the more I wonder if it’s a midlife thing. For so many years, our time belongs to everyone and everything else. There are careers to build, kids to raise, practices to drive to, appointments to schedule, groceries to buy, dinners to make, laundry to fold, forms to sign, birthdays to remember and approximately one million passwords we are somehow expected to know. Motherhood alone comes with an invisible administrative position nobody officially hired us for.
Then the kids get older and life begins shifting. You’re still needed, but you’re needed differently. There are these little pockets of space where you suddenly find yourself wondering what you want to do with your own time, and that question can be hard to answer.
I know what my kids like, I know what everyone in my house will and will not eat. I know what kind of workouts I enjoy, what books I’ll probably like, what coffee I order and which leggings actually stay up during squats. Ask me what I want to do on a random Tuesday night purely because it sounds fun, though, and apparently I need three to five business days to respond.
Maybe this is one of the strange gifts of getting older. We spend the first half of adulthood building everything around us. We build careers, families, homes, routines and identities. We become someone’s mom, someone’s wife, someone’s coworker, someone’s boss, someone’s teacher or the person everyone texts when they need to know what time something starts. Then somewhere in midlife, we start wondering about the person underneath all of those roles.
I don’t mean that in a dramatic “I need to find myself” kind of way. I know who I am. I also absolutely do not want to be 22 again. There are plenty of things about getting older that I really do like. I just think I want a little bit of the girl I was before everything she did needed to have a purpose.
I think maybe this is why nostalgia feels so powerful right now. So many of us are listening to the music we loved in high school, watching old shows, buying records again and getting embarrassingly excited when something from dELiA*s or our teenage years suddenly reappears. We talk about wanting the 90s back, but I don’t think most of us literally want to go backward. I think sometimes we’re looking for pieces of ourselves that got left there.
We remember sitting on our bedroom floors with YM and Seventeen magazines spread everywhere. We remember making mixtapes and spending hours talking to our friends without simultaneously doing six other things. We remember being creative without calling ourselves creators. We had interests without needing to build platforms around them, we made things that nobody ever saw, and somehow that didn’t make them feel like a waste of time.
That might be what I’m craving more than a hobby itself. I want to remember what it feels like to do something without documenting it, measuring it or wondering whether I’m good at it. I want to use my brain and my hands in different ways, I want evenings that aren’t automatically filled by scrolling my phone because I’m too mentally tired to think of anything else to do, I want to enjoy my weekends at the boat or vacay and not think oh this would make a great b-roll video for content.
So this fall, I’m conducting my own extremely unofficial midlife hobby experiment. I’m going to try things, some will probably last ten minutes, just like the dot art. Some might bore me, some I’ll probably be terrible at, there is a strong possibility mahjong will enter the picture, although first I need someone to explain to me why every woman over 40 suddenly seems to know how to play it.
The important part is that I’m giving myself permission not to turn any of it into anything, I don’t need another certification, I don’t need a side hustle (NOTHING wrong with a side hustle, hello I have a few.) I don’t need a challenge, a goal or a content series. I don’t need to become an expert. I’m allowed to be mediocre at something and still enjoy doing it.
Okay, there is a chance I’ll probably write about it, I am still me, LOL.
I think I just want to remind myself there are parts of our lives that don’t need to be useful, impressive or productive. At this stage of life, I’m just really feeling this.
Nikki Lanigan
Nikki Lanigan is a yoga, HIIT, and Barre instructor, she is also a Holistic Health Coach through Institute of Integrative Nutrition. Nikki is trained in Yoga Shred, Yoga Psychology, meditation, chakra balancing, and EFT/Tapping. She has done trainings with Sadie Nardini and Ashley Turner. She got her 200 hour yoga teacher training in 2017 at the Carrie Treister School Of Yoga. Nikki takes a holistic view of health, helping her students and clients reach a place of self-love not just through movement, but with mindset and lifestyle guidance as well. Nikki is also show prep writer for The McVay Media Show Prep and host of the podcast Fit, Fun, and Frazzled. Connect with Nikki on Instagram. www.instagram.com/nikkilanigan.yogaandwellness www.instagram.com/fitfunandfrazzledpodcast
