When I started experimenting with ballet as an adult, it had been well over a decade since I last took a class. I started alone with no mirrors, clutching my kitchen counter in tennis shoes. It was as if this routine had been lying dormant in my muscles and my memory. I still knew the steps. I could still hum music that had been paired with certain exercises. But now, this melody was accompanied by my knees snapping, crackling, and popping.
Dan P. McAdams, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, focuses on narrative identity. Part of that entails “this business about going back to the past, sometimes the distant past, and bringing something forward,” he said. While he hasn’t studied that exact process with a childhood hobby, he said that bringing something back that you feel good about “can be a very positive experience and make you feel like you're kind of integrating your life around something that was once really important to you.”
She taught Martin to crochet as early as kindergarten, and by fourth grade, they made a blanket for Martin’s childhood dog together. “I always think about her sitting and knitting,” Martin said. “I think that she did it as a way to keep her hands busy throughout the day as her mind worked.”
Benjamin Vigeant, 40, who works as a social media manager in Chicago, grew up with a pinball machine in his basement. He stopped playing until his late 20s, when he and a friend would play when they spotted pinball machines at bars, getting competitive with each other.
In a 2023 Teen Vogue article, Aiyana Ishmael interviewed Gen Zers who revisited hobbies they loved earlier in life, from swimming to fashion, as a means of “healing their inner child.” Revisiting childhood activities, in particular, can feel like a chance to reclaim part of your own story.
“Returning to a hobby abandoned in childhood has the potential to engage all three of these temporal selves at once: It draws on our reconstructed memory of what the activity meant to us then, it alters what we are actually doing in the present, and it gestures toward some version of ourselves we hope to become,” she said.
As I talked about my own return to a beloved childhood activity, I heard from others revisiting theirs, like someone who recently retired and went back to piano lessons, or the parent who started playing pick-up basketball games again after his kid expressed interest in playing, too.
There are plenty of conversations around how hobbies provide fulfillment and build community, and endless debates about what hobbies can be monetized. But by revisiting childhood hobbies specifically, we can discover how much we’ve changed, or how the parts of us that once loved this thing remained all along.
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