The Accidental Enthusiast

I need you to know something about me before we begin.

I was born on a Tuesday.

I don’t know exactly when I made the connection, but at some point I noticed that every significant decision in my life — every new direction, every sudden conviction, every moment where I wake up and become briefly but completely certain that I have discovered my true purpose — happens on a Tuesday.

Not Monday. Not Wednesday. Tuesday.

The day I decided I needed to learn woodworking? Tuesday. The day freeze drying entered my life as a serious pursuit? Tuesday. The day I watched one YouTube video about small engines and became, spiritually, a retired mechanic named Earl? Also Tuesday. I didn’t plan any of this. My brain simply came into the world on a Tuesday and has been honoring that anniversary every single week since.

I tell you this so that everything that follows makes slightly more sense. It won’t make complete sense. But slightly more.

I also need to tell you about my brain, because context matters and mine is genuinely relevant here.

I have ADHD. Specifically the AU-ADHD variety, which comes with a feature called hyperfixation — that glorious, all-consuming, I have finally discovered what I was put on this earth to do feeling that arrives without warning, takes over completely, and then disappears somewhere between day five and day twelve like a houseguest who never confirmed their checkout date.

I have, since this all started, given myself a more clinical-sounding diagnosis: I am an Accidental Enthusiast. It is not so much a personality type as a spiritual condition. One moment I am elbows-deep in a hobby I have no business pursuing. The next, I am sprinting away from it like it personally wronged me. The obsession arrives suddenly. The passion is completely real while it lasts. The burnout is immediate and total.

When hyperfixation arrives, it doesn’t offer mild interest. It offers total immersion. Full identity adoption. The complete costume. I don’t casually try things — I become them. I research extensively. I develop opinions. I use terminology in conversations where I have no business using it. I invest financially, emotionally, spiritually, and then the fixation relocates and I am left standing in a room full of equipment wondering what happened.

But here is the part nobody tells you and that I have only recently fully understood: my brain cannot distinguish between acquiring the tools and mastering the craft.

The yarn is the cardigan. The sewing machine is the fashion line. The sandpaper is the dining table.

Buying supplies genuinely feels like arriving at the destination. Which means every hobby begins with a shopping trip that feels like a graduation ceremony. Which means I have, over the years, accumulated an extraordinary amount of equipment for skills I practiced for between three and fourteen business days.

Where does it all live?

I’m glad you asked.

There is a storage unit in the basement of my condo building. It is climate controlled. I pay for it monthly. It contains, among other things, freeze drying equipment, candle supplies, soap molds, woodworking tools, yarn from two separate crochet eras that ended in identical defeat, and a sewing machine with unresolved emotional issues around bobbins.

The hobby graveyard is not a metaphor. It has a postal address.

Let us review the residents.

Crochet: The Yarn-Based Betrayal, Volume One

There was a period where I genuinely believed crochet was going to change my life. Not casually. Not recreationally. Spiritually.

I watched one soft-spoken woman on YouTube make a cardigan while calmly explaining tension control and I was immediately convinced that my future involved sitting on a porch somewhere crocheting blankets while healing emotionally and becoming serene and probably drinking something warm.

I did not ease into this. I bought twenty-eight crochet pins. Sixteen balls of yarn. Two instructional books. I subscribed to several suspiciously chipper YouTubers who all spoke about single crochet stitches like they were describing a religious experience. I arrived with the kind of unearned confidence that should, in hindsight, have worried someone.

The whole thing lasted four minutes.

Four minutes was exactly long enough to understand that this is a hobby engineered specifically to test patience and eyesight simultaneously, and that I possessed an insufficient supply of both. The first thing I made looked like a wounded potholder. The edges were fighting for their lives. Nothing was straight. Somehow the project kept getting wider without my permission, which I didn’t know was possible and which felt like a personal attack from the craft itself.

And yet I persisted. For three more days, past the original four minutes, out of pure stubbornness.

Then one missed stitch humbled me so severely that I put everything down, walked away, and did not return.

The yarn sat in the corner of my house quietly judging me. I told myself it was a break. It was not a break.

Crochet: The Yarn-Based Betrayal, Volume Two — This Time It’s Different

Several years later — enough time to have completely forgotten the emotional damage of Volume One — I decided to try crochet again. New yarn. New hooks. New attitude.

“I’m older now,” I told myself. “More patient. More disciplined. I’ve genuinely grown as a person.”

I had not grown as a person.

I got exactly as far as completing one loop before quietly, calmly accepting that crochet is simply not my ministry. It is a hobby for the patient, the gentle, the grandmothers with biceps of steel earned over decades of devoted stitching. I am none of these things. I swear on all twenty-eight of those original crochet pins that I will never attempt it a third time.

Crochet is slow. Profoundly, deliberately, insistently slow. Every single stitch is a tiny individual commitment and there are hundreds of them and they all need to be correct and I am a person whose brain is running seventeen tabs simultaneously. Crochet needs your one good tab, fully dedicated, with nothing else open.

We were fundamentally incompatible. We had always been fundamentally incompatible. Volume Two simply confirmed what Volume One already knew, faster and with fewer steps.

The yarn from Round Two now lives in the storage unit beside the yarn from Round One. They have had years to process this together. I wish them well.

Electronics Repair: The Tech Empire That Wasn’t

This whole mess, if I trace it back honestly, may have started here.

One day, completely unprovoked, I decided I should learn to fix my own electronics. Phones. Laptops. Assorted mystery cables that I am fairly certain belonged to something important, possibly something I still own, possibly something I threw away in a fit of decluttering that I now regret.

I built a gaming PC. Fully, genuinely convinced that I was standing at the edge of a personal tech repair empire, that this was simply the first domino in a chain of inevitable success. I got halfway through a second build before realizing, with sudden and total clarity, that I was tired, bored, and dangerously close to electrocuting myself for a project I had already lost interest in.

I ghosted the entire operation. Quietly. The way you ghost a situationship that never had a defined relationship status to begin with.

And then, almost immediately, I was deeply entrenched in a fantasy book series that had absolutely nothing to do with semiconductors and everything to do with magical teenagers saving the world. The transition was instant and total, as though the part of my brain responsible for the gaming PC simply closed the file and opened a new one without so much as a memo to the rest of me.

Excel: The Spreadsheet Honeymoon

At one point I decided that Excel and I were going to be very close friends.

Not the friendly budget-planner kind of Excel. I mean data validation. Conditional formatting. Dropdown menus. Nested formulas deployed with the unearned confidence of a Wall Street analyst who also happens to run a secret YouTube channel about it on the side.

Did I need any of this? Not even remotely. Was I thriving? Absolutely, for a window of time that felt, while it lasted, like it might be permanent.

Until one formula didn’t work.

That single failure broke my heart in cell C13 and I never opened the file again. The spreadsheet sits somewhere, abandoned mid-formula, a monument to a relationship that ended over one uncooperative function.

From there — and I want you to appreciate the logic of this transition, because there is one, even if it is unhinged — I went directly into reading every terms and conditions document I had previously signed without reading. Bank accounts. Credit cards. Every device I owned. It was, genuinely, enlightening. I emerged from that particular rabbit hole older, wiser, and fully convinced that I might be personally owed a class-action settlement from at least two companies.

And then, just as I was coming up for air from the terms and conditions, I began testing different pens on different types of paper.

I can feel your eyebrows raising from here. No, I am not under surveillance. Yet.

Snack Making: The Delicious But Expensive Era

At some point I became convinced I should be making my own snacks. From scratch. Not because snacks are difficult to obtain. But because my brain watched three videos about homemade granola bars on a Tuesday and decided this was a lifestyle.

I researched recipes with the focus of someone writing a dissertation. I bought ingredients I had never previously purchased. My kitchen smelled incredible and for a brief window I felt like a person who had things genuinely together.

The snacks were good. This is the part I find most annoying — they were genuinely good and I still stopped, which tells you everything about how this works. Success is not protection. Nothing is protection. The fixation simply relocates when it is ready and it does not consult you first.

The specialty ingredients are still in my pantry. They are no longer specialty. They are now just mystery.

Freeze Drying: A Whole Entire Machine

Snack making was one thing. Freeze drying required a machine.

A specific, dedicated, not-inexpensive machine that removes moisture from food through a process involving pressure and temperature that I understood completely for about two weeks and could not now explain under oath.

My logic at the time was airtight: emergency preparedness. Long-term food storage. Self-sufficiency. Very reasonable. Very rational. Absolutely not just a new hyperfixation wearing a practical coat so I wouldn’t notice it arriving.

I freeze dried fruit. I freeze dried full meals. I felt like a prepper, a scientist, and a small business owner simultaneously. It was a tremendous two weeks.

And then one Tuesday I simply did not turn the machine on. And then it was several Tuesdays.

The machine is in the storage unit. It is large. It takes up significant space. It costs money to store. It sits there as a monument to the version of me who was absolutely certain, for a very specific window of time, that food preservation was her calling.

Candle and Soap Making: My Scented Personality Era

I had a genuinely good run with candles and soap. For about a year and a half, my entire home smelled like a Pinterest board come to life. It was tranquil. It was lovely. It was exactly the right amount of chaotic alchemy — wax, fragrance oils, molds, a thermometer I monitored with real devotion.

I gifted so many bath products during this era that I was, for a window of time, basically running an unlicensed apothecary out of my own kitchen. Friends got candles for their birthdays. Coworkers got soap for no reason at all. I was generous to the point of mild concern.

But here is the thing nobody tells you about a scented-gift economy: there are only so many people you can hand a eucalyptus-lavender candle to before they start quietly blocking you around the holidays out of pure self-preservation.

And unlike my beloved LEGO sets, you cannot disassemble a finished soap bar and turn it into something else when you get bored. A soap bar, once made, simply exists, taking up space, waiting to be given away or used or thrown out, with no second life available to it.

So when my storage overflowed and my gift list finally, mercifully ran dry, the love died quietly. What started as therapy ended, gradually and without ceremony, as a clutter problem.

I also discovered, partway through this era, that candle making and soap making have variables — fragrance load percentages, wick sizing, cure time, and, in soap’s case, lye, which is not a forgiving ingredient and does not care about your Tuesday energy. I had signed up for vibes. I had, without realizing it, also signed up for chemistry.

The wax, the molds, and the fragrance oils — which still smell extraordinary, infuriatingly — are all in the storage unit now, having formed what I can only describe as a small, fragrant community down there. I think they’re okay.

The Almost Self-Care Business

This one, I will admit, had real potential.

I nearly turned the candle and soap operation into an actual business. I had the domain name purchased. I had a logo designed. I had an entire Pinterest board dedicated to packaging aesthetics that I revisited with real seriousness.

And then I remembered, with the suddenness of a record scratch, that I do not actually want to be an entrepreneur. I do not want to spend a Saturday morning researching FDA-compliant labeling requirements for bath bombs. I want to use the bath bomb. I do not want to run a focus group about it, manage inventory for it, or field customer service emails about it.

So that died a soft, lavender-scented death, somewhere between the logo and the labeling research, and I have never once regretted letting it go.

Baking: She Appears, She Conquers, She Remembers Why She Stopped

Every few months something wakes up inside me and says bake something. Not regularly. Not on a schedule. Just occasionally, mysteriously, with full conviction and no warning.

So I do it. I make banana bread. I make nkati-cake — which I will be calling peanut brittle at various points in this essay, and yes Sylvia, I can feel you rolling your eyes from wherever you are right now, I hear you, I acknowledge you, and I am still going to say it — and it comes out well and I am genuinely pleased with myself and I eat it and life is briefly very good.

And then I remember why I don’t bake regularly. The cleanup. The precision. The fact that baking unlike cooking does not forgive improvisation. Baking is a science that requires measurement and patience and I have already established my relationship with both of those things in this essay.

So I bake every now and then. The results are good. The banana bread is excellent and I stand by it fully. The motivation is intermittent and I have made peace with that.

Sylvia: the nkati-cake was also excellent and you know this.

The Walking Pad and The Weighted Jacket: Fitness by Accumulation

The walking pad arrived because I work from home and read an article about sedentary lifestyles and immediately concluded that what I needed was a treadmill designed to live under a desk so I could multitask my movement into my productivity. This is very logical ADHD math and I will not be apologizing for it.

I used it with genuine enthusiasm. I walked while working. I walked while watching videos. I felt optimized. Then the weighted jacket arrived because apparently walking alone was insufficient and I needed to also walk while being pressed into the earth like a panini.

I wore it three times. It made me feel like a committed athlete and also like I was being personally punished. Both simultaneously. Every single time.

The walking pad still gets used. This is one of my better outcomes and I want credit for it. The weighted jacket lives on a hook by the door where it functions primarily as a visual reminder of my intentions — I see it, I feel motivated in theory, I do not put it on, I leave, I return, the jacket is still there, we maintain our arrangement.

The Gym Era: Brief, Sincere, and Terminated by the Floor

There was a proper Gym Era. I went consistently. I had a routine. I had a playlist. I developed opinions about squat form with the confidence of someone who had been training for years rather than eleven days.

I told people I “go to the gym” in the present tense, which is the most powerful form of identity theft fitness culture has invented — claiming an entire personality based on past behavior and future intention with complete disregard for the present moment.

The Gym Era did not end because I got bored. The Gym Era ended because I passed out and hit the floor. Actual floor. Actual passing out. A real, physical, body-on-the-ground event.

My immediate, genuine, first response upon recovering was:

Yeah. I am not paying for that.

The injury did not stop me. The invoice did. I think that is the most honest sentence in this entire essay and I am choosing to leave it there without further comment.

Woodworking and the Bathroom: Why Did I Think I Was a 48-Year-Old Dad Named Michael?

Please explain why I became deeply interested in woodworking despite not owning tools, not having a garage, and living a life that has never once suggested “lumber specialist.”

I watched furniture restoration videos for two weeks straight and became completely convinced I could build a dining table. A dining table. As if I were a divorced father reconnecting with craftsmanship in a Hallmark movie about healing through carpentry.

I bought sandpaper. Why? No one knows. I learned words like “varnish” and “grain direction” and used them irresponsibly in casual conversation. I got an auto sprayer. I accumulated tools.

Now here is where I need to pause and insist on the record reflecting something important: I redid my entire bathroom.

Alone. The vanity took a year and a half on its own — circling back when the fixation returned, disappearing for weeks, coming back and doing another section, negotiating with myself and the timeline and the tools until it was finally done. It looks incredible. I bring it up at every available opportunity because I earned that and I will not be humble about it.

And then, recently, the rest of the bathroom became the project. We are three months into this current phase. It is chaotic. There is grout in my hair as I write parts of this. But unlike most of the entries on this list, I cannot abandon this one halfway through, because I need to use the bathroom, and failure stops being optional the moment plumbing and a functioning bladder are both involved.

The tools are not in the storage unit. The tools are still with me because tools are tools and tools never go to waste. They just wait. I have needed them for bed frames and furniture and walls and an entire bathroom and they have delivered every single time.

On Being Genuinely, Quietly Handy

I want to say something that the graveyard narrative sometimes obscures: I am handy. Properly, genuinely, usefully handy.

On this side of the world — and if you know, you know — furniture arrives in pieces. Appliances arrive in pieces. Everything is a project. I figure it out. I have assembled and disassembled furniture alone. I have done things that technically require two people using only myself and the creative application of my legs as a second pair of hands, which sounds undignified but is actually a highly effective technique I developed through necessity.

I also, eventually, learned to read the instructions before starting. I want to be clear that this lesson was not free.

I once spent twelve hours assembling an IKEA media unit. Alone. For a pregnant friend who needed it before the baby arrived. What should have taken four hours took twelve because I looked at the picture on the box and thought I understand what’s happening here and proceeded accordingly without reading a single page of the instructions.

I did not understand what was happening there.

The unit got finished. My friend came and collected it. She loved it. She does not know it took twelve hours and she does not need to. I now read every label before I begin anything. Twelve hours is a very efficient teacher.

Sewing: Fashion Designer Delusion

Sewing entered my life because I watched a woman on TikTok turn curtains into a dress. That is the entire origin story. One video. One curtain dress. And suddenly I was one motivational speech away from becoming the Ghanaian Coco Chanel.

I bought fabric. Thread. Pins. A measuring tape I never learned to use correctly. I told myself I would start small. By small I apparently meant structured garments with sleeves and intentions.

The sewing machine sounded stressed every time I approached it. We were both overwhelmed and neither of us was handling it well. I still do not fully understand bobbins. I refuse to learn at this point because it feels personal. The machine still exists in the storage unit, which means technically this era is paused rather than over, and I find that framing comforting even though we both know what it means.

Small Engines: A Truly Confusing Chapter

I don’t fully understand this one myself. One Tuesday — obviously — I became obsessed with learning how small engines work. Lawnmowers. Generators. Tiny mechanical systems. I watched repair tutorials with the focus and confidence of someone genuinely preparing for something.

“Ah yes,” I would say, nodding seriously at carburetor content. “The fuel-air mixture.”

I did not know what I was talking about. I still don’t. But for two weeks I was a retired man named Earl and I was thriving.

Coding: The Villain Origin Story

Every person with an ambitious brain eventually has a coding phase. You convince yourself you are about to build something that changes humanity while secretly struggling to center a div and questioning every decision that led you here.

Coding is uniquely engineered to make you feel brilliant and catastrophically stupid within the same fifteen-minute window. One moment: I understand logic. I see the matrix. The next: why is everything purple and how did that happen.

I enjoyed coding. I genuinely did. But coding requires consistency, discipline, and the emotional resilience of someone who can spend six hours debugging and discover the problem was a missing semicolon — a semicolon — and simply accept that and continue living. I am still working on that level of acceptance.

3D Design and Printing: I Was Designing Things and Then I Wasn’t

At some point I got into 3D design and printing. I was actually designing things. Real things. Objects that went from concept to file to physical printed item. I found this fascinating for a specific amount of time. And then I got bored. No incident. No failure. I was designing things and then one day I simply wasn’t.

The good news — and I want credit for this — is that I never bought the printer. By whatever grace watches over people like me, I caught myself before the machine acquisition and outsourced the printing instead. The 3D printer that does not exist in my storage unit is a monument to self-awareness.

Interior Design: I Did It Because I Could

There was also an interior design phase. Why? Because I can. I have an eye for space. I understand proportion and light and how a room should feel when you walk into it. I got into it, learned things, applied them, and the spaces I have lived in reflect it. This one quietly merged into just being someone who thinks about spaces. No storage unit required.

Gardening: Nature and I Have Reached a Settlement

Gardening started because I wanted peace. I wanted to reconnect with the earth. Touch grass, literally. Become one with nature. Nature rejected me immediately and without apology.

Plants are deeply unreasonable organisms. Why are you dying when I gave you water yesterday? Too much water. Why are you wilting in the sun? Too much sun. You need indirect light, which is a requirement so subjective it should be regulated.

I killed a succulent. I need you to understand what that means. Succulents are the plants specifically engineered to survive neglect. They store their own water. They were designed for someone like me. They are the prepper plants of the botanical world and I still managed to end one.

That was the moment I understood that full-scale plant parenthood was not my calling.

Current status: I have a strawberry plant and a cucumber on my balcony. They are alive. Probably. I don’t check on them every single day, which I acknowledge sounds concerning, but we have reached an arrangement. They do their thing. I water them when I remember. Neither of us makes demands the other cannot meet.

This is the gardening era in its final, evolved, sustainable form. The succulent could not be reached for comment.

YouTube University: The One That Never Ended

YouTube University started as a phase. It became a situation. One interesting video led to another and another and suddenly it was 2am and I knew significantly more about ancient Rome than I did four hours ago and felt this was an entirely reasonable use of my evening.

And then History found me and I have not left. I am still on History. I have watched hundreds of hours about civilizations that no longer exist and I feel, if anything, owed more content. This is my longest running fixation and I consider it deeply valid and academically enriching and not at all just watching dramatic reenactments of medieval sieges at midnight.

I am also still learning about the Bible. Quieter, more personal, the kind of study that keeps revealing new layers the longer you sit with it. These two — history and scripture — are the intellectual anchors. Everything else in my brain may be in motion but these two are ground.

The Survivors: Things That Actually Made It Out

Before you feel too sorry for the storage unit and everything in it, I need you to know that some things stayed. Not everything I touched turned to abandoned yarn. Some things took root and are still standing. Let us acknowledge them properly.

LEGOs and Puzzles — I have been building things since I was small and I have not stopped. This is not a phase. This is load-bearing personality. My LEGOs are displayed, assembled, visible, because I built them and I find them beautiful and I refuse to hide them in a bin. Sometimes I take a finished set apart on purpose, just to rebuild it again, which I recognize is its own small act of madness but it brings me genuine joy so I have stopped questioning it. If you cannot find me in a store check the LEGO aisle. I will be there with opinions.

Writing — Writing stayed because writing was never really a hobby. It was just how I process being alive. I read books. I learned the craft. I studied it obsessively and then I never put it down. This blog is proof of that. Blog Five. We are here. We are doing it.

Reading and Audiobooks — A book a week, every week, non-negotiable. Audiobooks changed my life in the specific way things change your life when they meet your brain exactly where it is. 2.8x speed and a physical book before bed. This one is not going anywhere.

Cooking — I cook. I want to be clear that I say this without significant enthusiasm and with complete honesty. I can produce genuinely good food. Do I love it currently? No. Cooking and I are in a complicated relationship I would describe as mutually necessary but emotionally unresolved. It is a labour. It is occasionally a love. Right now love is on backorder. I’m keeping it anyway because the recipe books cost real money.

Journalling — Journalling stuck because it requires nothing from me except honesty and something to write with. No equipment. No supplies. No thermometer. Just paper and whatever needs to come out tonight. I rant on paper. I call it a night. I highly recommend it.

Machinery and the Forklift — The small engines, automotive, electronics, and PC repair phases didn’t fully die. They got quiet. I still fix appliances when they need fixing, I still change my own tires seasonally like it’s a small sacred ritual I perform twice a year. The phases were the dramatic versions. The ongoing competence is the quiet version that stayed.

And then I got on a forklift.

I don’t know how to explain the transition from “woman who watches carburetor tutorials” to “woman certified on heavy industrial machinery” without it sounding like a dramatic leap, but it was the natural conclusion of a brain that finds mechanical things interesting and one day found itself with access to an actual forklift and thought: yes. obviously. this.

I got the training. I took it seriously. I have been learning ever since. And I drive it. I actually drive it.

Out of everything in this essay — the yarn, the lye, the freeze dryer, the sandpaper, the bobbins, the succulent I murdered, the twelve hours of IKEA furniture built with my legs for a pregnant friend — the thing that started as a phase and became a real, licensed, ongoing skill is the forklift.

The woman who couldn’t keep a succulent alive is certified on heavy machinery. Nobody saw that coming. Least of all me.

The Certificate Theory: Why Some Things Actually Stick

I want to pause here and offer an actual theory, because I think I have finally figured out the pattern underneath all of this chaos, and it is more specific than simply “I lose interest.”

Please note: I do follow through, reliably and completely, when there is a tangible reward waiting at the end. Give me a certificate, a license, a credential — any kind of proof that the thing happened and that I can hold evidence of it — and I will not just commit, I will thrive. Forklift license? Got it. Project management certification? Done, completed, framed in spirit if not literally.

This is, I think, the actual key to the entire pattern. The hyperfixation is not actually about the activity itself. It is about the chase — the discovery, the immersion, the rapid climb toward competence. Most hobbies don’t offer an endpoint. There is no final boss to crochet. There is no certificate for soap making. The activity just continues, indefinitely, asking for the same sustained attention forever with no checkpoint to mark that you have, in fact, arrived.

But give my brain a defined finish line — a test, a license, a credential, a single measurable proof that the chase is officially over and I won — and the follow-through arrives instantly and completely. I am not flaky. I am not uncommitted. I am, very specifically, a person who needs to know where the finish line is, because without one my brain assumes the activity is infinite and infinite things are, by definition, things my brain eventually leaves.

Lesson learned: If knowledge is the prize and a certificate is the proof, I will not only commit. I will thrive.

Recurring Affairs of the Heart

Not everything that leaves stays gone forever. Some of these little episodes do come back around, on their own schedule, uninvited and unannounced.

The Sims is my toxic ex that I keep crawling back to. I build an elaborate house. I marry someone wildly inappropriate — a vampire, on one memorable occasion. I forget to feed the in-game baby and feel a genuine flash of guilt about a child who does not exist. I quit, completely, convinced I am done forever. And then, three months later, I reinstall it like the idea has just occurred to me for the first time, with zero memory of having sworn it off.

I currently maintain a save where I am a widow with triplet teenage boys, running a shop that sells handmade clay items. The boys’ father became a bum. Circumstances were assessed. A determination was made. We have moved on and the boys are thriving and I own a shop and we do not need to discuss this further.

The Sims has always been the place where my building brain, my interior design instincts, my project-completion satisfaction, and my absolute refusal to tolerate nonsense all combine into one very productive Tuesday evening.

Small, Permanent Strangeness

And then there is the layer of this that has nothing to do with hobbies at all, and everything to do with simply living alone long enough to discover who you actually are when nobody else is watching.

I talk myself through chores like I am hosting a cleaning podcast with an audience of exactly one. I make PowerPoint presentations, genuinely, to strengthen arguments I am planning to make to other actual humans. I record voiceovers for my own daily tasks, narrating my own life back to myself as though it might need closed captioning later. I invent elaborate backstories for strangers I pass on the street and then think about those backstories for the rest of the day.

I have named every inanimate object in my house, and — this is the part that actually concerns me slightly — I remember all of their names.

Paul the kettle says hi.

What the Phases Actually Did

Here is something I want to say clearly before we close: I kept the knowledge. Every single time.

The hyperfixation moves on but the skill doesn’t fully disappear. I stopped making candles but I understand fragrance load percentages. I stopped making soap but I know how lye behaves. I can fix an appliance because of the small engines and electronics phases. I can build furniture because of the woodworking phase. I can read a room because of the interior design phase. I can navigate a spreadsheet, change my own tires, and explain, with real confidence, why I am probably owed money by at least two companies whose terms and conditions I once read in full.

I didn’t master any of them. I didn’t turn them into careers. But I can do them. At a functional, competent, actually-useful level. Learning something — even briefly, even intensely, even while fully wearing the costume of someone who definitely has a garage and knows what varnish is — leaves a mark.

And nothing went to waste. If there was a project in progress when the fixation left, I finished it and gave it away. The crocheted things went to someone. The candles went to someone, until they ran out of someones to go to. The soaps went to someone. The projects became gifts, which means the hobbies didn’t die so much as they graduated into generosity, and I think that reframe is both accurate and flattering to me and I am keeping it.

The equipment I kept until I moved recently and then I donated it and gave it away. If you’re wondering why I didn’t sell it — I don’t have time for that. Too much logistics. I gave it away because giving is faster and I was not in the mood for the administrative requirements of a secondhand transaction.

Everything is in the storage unit now. The physical graveyard. Climate controlled. Paid monthly. Full of abandoned identities and expensive lessons and yarn that survived two separate crochet eras and is still, somehow, intact.

Conclusion: The Museum of Almosts

They say living alone will make you a little crazy. I disagree. I think it just gives you the space to actually meet yourself, undisturbed, without an audience managing your behavior. And sometimes the self you meet is a little eccentric, a little brilliant, and currently has six open browser tabs split evenly between retiling a shower and starting a mushroom farm.

I am not flaky. I am passionate, in short, unsustainable bursts. I am not uncommitted. I simply believe deeply in trial, error, and moving on before the trauma fully sets in.

I wandered into entirely different worlds just because I was curious enough to knock on the door. I became, briefly and sincerely, a candlemaker, a freeze dryer, a prepper, a mechanic, a coder, a carpenter, a farmer, a fashion designer, a fitness girlie, a historian, a soap maker, a snack creator, a spreadsheet analyst, a terms-and-conditions scholar, and a retired man named Earl.

I didn’t master most of them. But I showed up. I tried. I bought the supplies, which my brain registers as a form of arrival, and honestly at this point I’m not sure my brain is wrong. Something was learned every single time. Something stayed every single time. The graveyard is full but so am I — full of fragments and skills and half-finished knowledge and the quiet confidence of someone who has assembled furniture with her legs and driven a forklift and made genuinely good soap and still doesn’t understand bobbins but has decided that’s the craft’s problem and not hers.

Somewhere in all this chaos, I have accidentally become the most interesting person at the dinner table — provided someone else is hosting, because I recently took apart my own dining chairs to reupholster them and got distracted halfway through, and we do not currently have a full set of functioning chairs.

Maybe life isn’t only about becoming one thing forever. Maybe sometimes it’s about collecting experiences. Tiny identities. Fragments of wonder. Phases that taught you something and then handed you off to the next one.

And if civilization collapses tomorrow .

I may not last long.

But for a very confusing, extremely well-supplied six days, operating out of what is essentially a prepper storage unit in my condo basement —

I will be unbelievably useful.