I swept my arm overhead, forming a half-moon shape as my body bent into a side stretch. I could almost hear the ballet instructors of my childhood calling out steps: Plié first position. Keep your heels down. Legs straighten, lift your kneecaps. Stretch toward the barre.
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.
In addition to being floored by what I could recall (even if my body couldn’t quite execute it), I was taken aback by how an activity that defined my childhood and young adulthood felt like an opportunity for my preteen self to tell me something about who I was now.
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.”
For some, revisiting these activities brings up memories. Kristen Martin, author of The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow, grew up in a multigenerational household, and her grandmother was constantly knitting. She was known for making everyone slippers in different color combinations of stripes, in addition to full-sized blankets.
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.”
When Martin picked up knitting and crocheting again in adulthood, she noticed something similar in herself. She typically practices her hobby at night with the TV on, a wind-down activity. “I find it very relaxing as something that I can focus on, but without my full attention,” she said. She loves making things for other people, just as her grandmother did.
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.
Eventually, he started a pinball league in Chicago. “I really enjoy competing, and now there’s a bunch of people competing with me,” Vigeant said.
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.
According to Hollen Reischer, visiting assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo, narrative identity refers to the “internalized, evolving story of the self,” including the past as we remember it, the present, and the future we imagine.
“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.
The more frequently I took myself through basic ballet steps, the more I noticed glimmers of my younger self present-day: The preteen who wanted to show up early and stay late at the studio, trying to get a step just right, became an adult who painstakingly fiddles with sentences to find the right words, reaching for the same “ah-hah!” moment. I wondered about my younger self’s fearlessness—her willingness to throw herself into steps that were too hard, even if she stumbled. I no longer leap across studios, but I yearn for more of that freedom to try in my adult life.
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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