Strong Hobbies

For most of the life that I can remember, I’ve had a strong hobby.

In elementary and middle school I was obsessed with magic tricks — mostly card tricks. The first reason I ever had to use YouTube was to subscribe to YouTube channels that would teach me card tricks. Every free moment I had, I would watch videos about card tricks and memorize them to perform later to my parents or friends.

After that, I had a brief stint with duck tape (don’t laugh). It was mostly making duck tape wallets, and again I learned all of it through YouTube videos from people who had the same hobby.

Then it was photography. I went around everywhere taking photos, especially on family vacations. I watched YouTube videos on how to take better pictures and critiques of other people’s portfolios and behind-the-scenes videos of wedding photography.

And then towards the beginning of high school, programming became my latest hobby. That’s the current one.

I seem to always have had something. Something that I obsess over, spend all my time with, and am always trying to get better at.

I wonder if it’s a result of being an only child. (People tell me I have “only child energy,” which feels like something I should be offended by.) Perhaps I replaced my lack of siblings with hobbies so that I would have things to do.

But I love it that way. I’m never really bored — on the contrary, I seem to never have enough time to work on my projects. It gives me internally-motivated things to work on outside of school work, so I have things to look forward to.

The strong hobbies are probably the best part of life for me.