the sheer unpredictability of it is maddening: here's something you like doing. here's something you really like doing, that you've thought about for a while, that you began, that you're good at, that you're viscerally enjoying. here's the bread to bake, the plants to water, the pattern to draw, the text to write. here's a community you like, here's an activity you enjoy. you're careful about it, anxious about overplaying it: you're doing it for a day, a week, a month. you're into it, consistent, it's bringing you great joy! it's challenging but amazing. it makes you feel better. you get some equipment for it. you spend time setting everything just so. you talk about it, cautiously. you fantasize about it when you're not doing it. even the hard and exhausting parts of it feel good or doable or virtuous to you oh, it's so good. it's so great to hold.

then, boom! halt, halt, halt. this part of you isn't yours anymore. it's not that you lose interest, and it's not that you lose the energy; it's more like it's not yours anymore, and never has been. those plants are somebody else's plants. this dough starter you've been lovingly feeding is alien and unpleasant; the person who got up every morning to do the same set of soothing, beautiful movements is somebody else, somebody so far removed from you she might as well be an alien, too. things you've bought and set up and arranged freeze into awkward stalagmites of matter, technically here but untouchable. trying to use them again - trying to remind yourself how good it felt, how easy it was, how easy it is - it's like cutting your hair and then trying to hold the cut-off ends next to the hair still on your head. it's been yours! it's not yours anymore.

sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, rarely. sometimes it's possible to wait the cycle out, and hold things again. it helps if you just accept the halt as is, without the shame that comes with it. by god, there's so much shame that comes with it! here you go again, starting a thing you will drop soon. here you go again, excited about a hobby you won't touch. oh, no more drawing? we loved the bread, the family will sigh. nobody will mention - they're kind people, and they love you and your idiosyncrasies - the supplies or the tools, those awkward funeral mounds of things that halted. you will still think about it. next time you get into something, you will go into it hesitantly, in half-shame, half-defiance, laughing at yourself in advance: yea, i will get it for myself, to use it three times. silly me, eh?

then hold, then halt, then hold, then halt. then halt, then halt, then halt. the self-preservation kicks in: you don't really hold all that much. what's the point of getting excited? the more you get excited, the sooner it will stop being yours. it's easier to just - drift - by. reading is free, at least, and nobody will know whether you're feasting - four, five books a week, reading on breaks, reading in snatches at traffic lights - or sitting with three different texts opened for months on three different devices.

there's no moral, not really. there's so many explanations to be found, and so many solutions - you tried them all for size, one after another, and sometimes they fit and sometimes they don't and sometimes they fit but not for long. sometimes you're a hostage to something within, along for the ride you didn't choose. the only thing you learn here - hopefully - is a bit of mercy.