If you've read any of my posts, you might have already noticed a theme: I am someone who is perpetually, enthusiastically, sometimes frustratingly trying new things. I'll stumble across something that looks interesting, throw myself into it completely, buy the gear, do the research, tell everyone about it — and then, a few weeks or months later, quietly set it aside and move on to the next thing.

For a long time, I felt genuinely bad about this. Like there was something wrong with me. Like I lacked discipline, or commitment, or whatever it is that makes other people able to stick with a single hobby for years. I'd look at people who'd been knitting or playing guitar or running marathons for decades and think: how do they do that?

The honest answer, which took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out, is that those people found the thing that was right for them. And the only way to find that thing is to try a whole lot of wrong things first.

I just happen to be someone who needs more tries than most.