#started to get on ambien for this so uhhh not proofread

[bakurapika]

cannot recommend highly enough as a grown-up to learn new little hobbies and come back to things you could do as a kid

i'm learning how to play go (yes, because of manga) - i had tried as a kid, and I remember the desperate searching through local stores to find anything related - back when even buying something on eBay was still sketchy enough for a credit-card-owning parent to be hesitant. i'm bad! but the absolute rush from beating the AI on the easiest setting - the glee when watching beginner guides and realizing that i already knew that term - i was able to solve that problem

when i was 11, i got a clarinet - i went for one year to a fancy school (expensive tuition but discounted because my mom worked for them) where you were required to buy and play an instrument for music class. I liked the saxophone, but clarinets were much cheaper and money was tight.

I'd had to take music lessons of various types through my childhood, and now as an adult i realize that the reason i struggled so much was that grown-up instruments are made for grown-up hands! playing chords on the piano or guitar made my fingers hurt, and I was told I would get over it if I practiced enough - but I didn't mean "callouses," I meant "my fingers can't stretch that far without pain and discomfort." (as an adult, if I play guitar, I play my 7/8th size cordoba, and even that isn't as easy as it could be.)

all that to say, i grew to dislike any musical instrument that played chords. reeds are a whole other beast, and i don't know what I learned as a kid (embouchure??), but I've always been able to pull that clarinet out and at the very least make some musical sounds come out of it. which i got the urge to do recently. I'm still not living alone but I've been sneaking time to play. and i bought new reeds for the first time since 2005.

i was squeaky as hell of course! even with the new reeds, still embarrassingly so! but i've been playing just for the fun of it when I feel like it. and I realized yesterday when I squeaked that it was the first time I'd done it that day after a half hour or so of fiddling around, where even 2 weeks ago, i was squeaking every minute at least. And I can comfortably reach lower notes because I'm adjusting my breath the right way to do so, without having been intentionally practicing.

I know this is getting long. my point is just

a reminder to myself as much as anything else. going back to being bad at something seems embarrassing. you don't need to be able to perform it (while being allowed to show off if you want to, in a space that you think will get positivity)

and somehow that being-bad allows for some really cool surges of excitement and surprise when you are already so much better!

when i briefly was actually in the habit of exercising and found i was much stronger than i had been, had more muscles than before, even though I was barely working a sweat, my friend told me those are called "noob gains" by the bodybuilding community. i'm stealing that. i want noob gains in everything. to put in that little bit of effort to learn the ropes and get better!

it doesn't matter if i don't ever play go again in my life, if I get bored with it tomorrow. I still had fun, genuine pride, feeling like I learned something new. and we never leave these things behind, not really. my mouth still knows how to put noise into clarinet. if in 20 years i want to join an orchestra, i can start intensive training then. and i'll be able to do that because for a week or two, every once in a long while, I picked it up and had fun with it