Here are the activities that bring me joy !
I am a lifelong reader and writer! Around the time I learned to read, I also started writing little stories and just wouldn't stop. Some of my earliest memories are of making little "books" out of printer paper. This tendency has remained with me all my life; in 2022 I received my Bachelor's degree in Writing & Rhetoric.
My favorite medium is poetry, mainly because it requires less discipline. I like that poetry allows me to convey a complex series of emotions rather quickly. However, poetry is rather introverted in nature, in the sense that it's meant to depict a slice of one person's interiority. But fiction and creative nonfiction, when written well, are more extroverted in nature; they incorporate a broader swath of humanity, there are characters interacting with each other in some way. This feels like the next horizon for me in terms of genre. I've written a few creative nonfiction pieces that I think are decent, and one which I think is stellar. As for fiction, I've got a few things in the works, but who knows when I will finish them. Writing fiction is hard, y'all! But I am confident I will hone my craft with time.
I think my favorite thing about writing is the way it leads me to experience the world. Every perception is ripe with the potential to be woven into a narrative. In that sense, I see sparks of interest wherever I look. Stories told by friends and family become fodder for a fictional scenario, and everyone I meet is fair game to be desribed fairly in prose. (A welcome side effect of this mentality is that I also pay really close attention to people when they talk, which people tend to like.)
This is another pasttime that has stuck with me from childhood. I started with beads and string, then moved on to cold connections and basic wire wrapping.
As I got older, I started wanting to make real jewelry, stuff made out of precious metals like copper and silver. You can really only achieve a certain amount of customization with store-bought jewelry components; at some point you just need to saw into some metal to get it to do what you want. So I started taking jewelry classes at my local community college after graduating from the four-year university I attended. (I declare myself a lifelong student!) Here are some things I've made:
If you are interested in jewelry and you get a chance to try silversmithing, I highly highly recommed it! It's so much fun to do, and so gratifying to own and wear your finished pieces.