Hand-Me-Down Hobbies much?

The Last 10% of Who You Are Is Someone Else's Fault

I know more about trains than I consented to, but I didn’t fully understand how far gone I was until last week, when I found myself genuinely, independently excited about a model train show happening in my city this weekend. Not excited in a “I’ll go because my toddler will love it” way. Excited in a “I wonder if they’ll have the new Bachmann HO scale series” way, which is a sentence I typed just now and had to read back twice because I don’t recognize the person who wrote it.

My kid arrived 20 months ago, decided trains were the apex of human civilization, and has been prosecuting that argument every waking hour since. I was simply present for long enough, and somewhere in that time the interest stopped being his and started being mine too, quietly, without my permission, the way water gets into a basement. I didn’t notice until I was already damp. Congratulations on your new hobby!

I collect hobbies, which is a polite way of saying I have a lot of crap I’ve only used for a few days and then never again. But doing an honest accounting of how I got here, I notice that a lot of what I think of as my interests have a prior owner. Someone else held these before I did, and I picked them up by standing close enough, long enough. There’s a whole taxonomy of how this happens so I’ll attempt to name them.

The first kind is Drafted i.e. you didn’t volunteer, you got conscripted. Your toddler makes trains a religion and now you’re a congregant attending every screening of locomotive footage, developing opinions about diesel versus electric, pointing out train tracks and screaming “Baa Traae”(toddler for Bart Train) from the car window because the habit has taken up residence in you and is paying no rent. Your best friend starts cold brew fermentation in the garage and suddenly you’re at a dinner party explaining bloom ratios with the confidence of someone who definitely sought this knowledge out on purpose.

The second kind is Osmosis, and I have a confession to make here. An ex-boyfriend was deeply into Pantera. He played them constantly, and it gave me headaches, actual physical headaches, for the better part of a year. I don’t know exactly when the headaches stopped and something else started, but at some point “Walk” just got in, past every defense I thought I had, and I apparently liked it enough to keep listening through the neurological protest. The relationship ended. The headaches ended. The Pantera stayed, and I now have strong opinions about the groove metal genre, which I came to via suffering and would not have predicted for myself under any other circumstances. Speed cubing arrived the same way, except the ex-boyfriend was TikTok, which kept putting competitive Rubik’s Cube solvers in front of me until I apparently decided I needed a cube of my own and opinions about finger tricks, which is not a sentence I ever expected to type.

The third kind is Absorbed through love, the most interesting kind and the hardest to trace because it doesn’t feel like acquisition, it feels like growing. Your husband’s coffee thing started as his, and you engaged with it because you engaged with him, asking questions and tasting the differences he pointed out and standing in the kitchen at 6am talking about grind size as a form of closeness. Then one day you’re at a café alone, asking the barista about their extraction temperature, and you realize you can’t remember when this became yours. The graft took so cleanly there’s no visible scar, which sounds romantic until you notice you are now voluntarily reading coffee blogs at eleven at night alongside the train content.

The fourth kind is Inherited, and it’s the strangest one because there was no transaction you can point to, no moment of transfer, no relationship you can even blame. My dad could pick up a fountain pen and fill a page with comics on demand, characters and panels appearing out of nowhere while the rest of us watched, and I grew up thinking this was simply a thing some people could do, the way some people can parallel park or whistle loudly. I didn’t think of it as something I was absorbing. I was just a kid sitting at the same table. And then the pandemic arrived, and I was home, and I was restless, and I picked up a pen, and apparently the roots had been there the whole time, waiting for the right conditions to surface. Nobody handed me that interest. It was just in the air of my childhood long enough to become part of me, which is the quietest and most patient way an interest can travel.

I was at the Julia Child exhibit at the MAC Museum in Napa last weekend (which is the kind of sentence that makes me sound more cultured than I am) and learned something I hadn’t known → she wasn’t a food person before Paris, didn’t cook, spoke no French, and arrived there in 1948 only because her husband Paul, a diplomat and the actual epicure in the relationship, got posted there. Her memoir credits “the man who had swept her to Paris in the first place,” which is a lovely way of acknowledging that the greatest American cook of the twentieth century got into cooking secondhand. She became more famous for it than Paul ever was for anything, and then one day wrote a memoir thanking the person who handed it to her.

So it’s fair to pause and think if any of your interests ever were originally yours to begin with? Trace any of them back far enough and you find a friend who wouldn’t stop talking about something until you tried it, a book that redirected your attention at exactly the right moment, a parent with strong opinions about a sport, an algorithm that put something in front of you when you were susceptible. The interests you feel most possessive of, the ones you’d name first on any questionnaire about yourself, almost all have a prior owner if you’re willing to look. The first owner gets forgotten, the provenance disappears, and you call what remains a self. Maybe all interests are secondhand and most of us just never run the trace.

Bourdieu called the dispositions absorbed below conscious choice “habitus,” which is a very French way of explaining why I now have opinions about Fridrich vs ZZ Speedcubing techniques.

Our hobbies are a fossil record of our relationships i.e. the trains are my kid at 20 months, absolutely certain about what matters; the Pantera is an ex-boyfriend with good taste in music and poor taste in volume; the speed cubing is TikTok doing what TikTok does; the coffee is a person who cared enough to explain why it matters and someone who cared enough to listen; the comic sketching is my dad at a table, pen in hand, not teaching me anything, just being himself while I watched.

hand_me_down_self = (drafted + osmosis + absorbed + inherited) / intention

That stuff that seeped in without your consent, is the last 10% of who you are, and it’s probably the most interesting part. I’ll probably still be reading about the Bachmann HO scale series at 11 at night, too, if I’m being honest. Some grafts take very, very cleanly.