My Obsessions
My weakness is obsession. I am constantly finding new things I want to learn about, do, try, understand, make sense of, or figure out, and then spending every moment of my free time reading, writing, listening, working, and learning everything about them. I’ve always been this way. For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessing over things. I can’t help myself.
Here are some of my most recent obsessions:
Learning how to make maple syrup
Beekeeping
Analog photography
Whales
Baby whales
Graham Greene
Bees
The history of spacewalking
Shakespeare
Falconry
These have joined an incredibly long list of existing obsessions. That list is far too long to include here and would likely bore you to tears, but here are some of the highlights:
Oak trees
The origin of the universe
Number theory
Horses
Off-the-track Thoroughbreds
The history of the violin
Playing the violin
Ants
Spiders
Filmmaking
Cinematography
Russian literature
Science Fiction
Acting
The Meisner Technique
(I could go on and on, but I’ll stop myself there.)
This is how it goes: Any time I learn about something new that fascinates me — a problem, a sport, a skill, a topic, an author, or the like — my curiosity becomes overpowering, to the point that it feels very much like a physical hunger. I then throw all of my free time and free attention into it. I read about it. I read first the books that are well-known and easy to find, and then I dig through the footnotes and the bibliographies of those to find the good stuff. I search through bookstores, libraries, online archives, forums, articles. I make lists of questions, take weirdly-later-indecipherable notes. I take classes. I go to workshops. I join clubs. I email professionals and experts. Sometimes, I even write letters. I dive and dive and dive until I’ve gotten the lay of the land and figured out the basics and then I come back for air. Sometimes, I revisit the object of my obsession only infrequently (spiders and ants are like this for me). But other obsessions I return to again and again, going deeper and deeper. The violin, writing, literature, filmmaking, acting, physics, math, and horses are like this for me. I can never get enough. My curiosity is never satisfied. The further I dive, the deeper the ocean. These, to me, are obsessions of endless discovery, endless possibility, endless joy.
My obsessions come in handy for writing. It’s a very lucky fact for me that I’m a writer, since the obsessing and writing parts of myself go together very well. I’m never at a loss for ideas. I’m never at a loss for words. I’m never at a loss for inspiration. My bucket is always full. I always have my obsessions to draw upon. That is the good part of all of this.
The problem is that after I’ve done the initial rabbit-holing and deep-diving and learning everything I can about something, the obsession never quite goes away. I find something new that fascinates me, and my attention is diverted away, but that love, that curiosity, that pure obsession, remains. It’s a lot like having kids. After my daughter was born, I thought there way no way I could ever love another human being as much as I loved her. Imagining having another child led me to think that somehow I would have to split this love, this love that came from my entire hear, between the two, and I couldn’t ever imagine loving my daughter any less. When my son was born, I found, to my utter delight, that my love for my daughter never diminished. It didn’t have to. Instead of my heart having to split in two, it seemed that my capacity to love had actually grown, and that by bringing this child into the world and loving him so deeply, I had somehow also created in myself an entirely new chamber of my heart that was filled with love for him, and the love for my daughter remained.
Obsession, for me, is like that. With each new fascination, my capacity for curiosity and understanding and passion only grows. And I’ve found that when it comes to obsessions, like children, the more you have of them, the less time you have to devote to each — even though my love has not been split between them, my time definitely has. And this is where I struggle the most. This is where the complexity comes in.
My time (like yours, I imagine) is completely accounted for. I have two young children. I have a husband. I have a countably infinite list of chores and tasks that must be completed. I have to work. I have two horses. I have friends. I have family. I have obligations, and my daily obligations greatly overwhelm and exceed and fill every minute of every day. And yet, throughout the days, as I’m driving the kids to school or putting laundry away or packing school lunches or paying bills or taking a bathroom break, my mind can’t help but focus on my newest obsession. I daydream about it. I read about it at stoplights and in pediatricians’ waiting rooms and while waiting for my kids to get out of class and while they’re bouncing around at gymnastics class. I lose myself in it and I feel, for a brief window in time, as if I am walking into a clear, cool, perfectly calm lake and emerging with new knowledge, new understanding, a new way of thinking about the world around me and my place within it.
The most frustrating obsessions — the ones that truly haunt me and torment me the most and are a thorn in my side — are the ones that are physical rather than intellectual, things like ballet, fencing, beekeeping, photography, filmmaking, playing the violin, learning the harp. These are things I can’t do in the in-between, can’t work on or explore while sitting at the dentist or watching my kids at soccer practice. When am I supposed to find time for these? I ask myself. How am I supposed to fit them into my life? Many people, I think, would leave it there. But I don’t. And the simple, god-honest reason I don’t is that I can’t. If I get an obsession, I have to act on it. If I don’t, I can’t function. I can’t think, I can’t work, I can’t sleep. So I fit it in. I do the Meisner program. I do a beekeeping workshop. I learn how to perform Shakespeare. I take fencing lessons. And I don’t know how the hell I fit it all in, but I do it in small pieces, a little at a time, and the curiosity and the pure longing to know and be able and be are then satisfied.
I have a long list of them, these things I want to understand and do and learn and discover. The list is always growing, and I’m adding to it constantly. Whenever I’m feeling out of sorts or lost or depressed or purposeless, I look at that list, and I instantly feel better. The world feels full of lovely, mysterious, magical things that are mine for the taking, mine to experience, mine to understand, mine to enjoy, mine to figure out. And then I choose one, whatever one strikes my heart and ensnares my curiosity, and I dive right in.