Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?
I used to be a jump-rope person.
Not casually. Not “oh look, there’s a rope.” I was a bring-a-jump-rope-on-a-cross-country-road-trip person.
There are photos of me at rest stops somewhere in the middle of America, gleefully hopping like an overcaffeinated camp counselor while everyone else was focused on beef jerky and existential dread. Jumping rope wasn’t exercise. It was identity. It was cardio with flair. It was, frankly, a lifestyle brand.
I don’t think I even own a jump rope anymore.
I have no memory of the breakup. No dramatic farewell. No ceremonial last hop. One day I was a jump-rope person, and now I am a person who occasionally throws out her back reaching for a charger.
This is how it happens.
Not with decisions. With drift.
Take movie theaters. When I lived in Los Angeles, I went to the movies every weekend. Religiously. I treated cinema like some people treat church or SoulCycle. I knew release schedules. Directors. Indie buzz. Oscar whispers.
Now? I couldn’t name a single movie currently in theaters if my life depended on it.
If you told me a film called Explosions 9: Emotional Reckoning was topping the box office, I’d nod thoughtfully and say, “Ah yes, the franchise really matured.”
Then there’s Coke Zero. I used to drink it constantly. Daily. Devotedly. If hydration were a personality quiz, my result was “Artificially Sweetened Loyalty.”
I didn’t quit. I didn’t swear it off. I didn’t have a health epiphany involving lemons and moral superiority.
I just stopped.
It slipped quietly out of my life like a background character written off mid-season. No finale, no explanation, no contract dispute announcement.
Which makes me think about how many things enter our lives loudly and leave silently.
Hobbies. Habits. Obsessions. Entire eras of ourselves.
It’s less like reinvention and more like rotation. It’s a slow emotional carousel of who we are at any given moment.
Kind of like that old soap opera, As the World Turns. Is that still on? Do soaps still exist? I genuinely have no idea.
Many moons ago, I would have known. I would have had opinions. Possibly strong ones. Possibly delivered while jumping rope and sipping a Coke Zero outside a movie theater.
And, books! I used to read a ton. Now, not so much.
Now I know other things.
I know how to schedule MRIs.
I know the precise emotional tone of a 5 a.m. alarm. I know that interests don’t vanish. They compost.
They turn into whatever comes next.
Maybe someday I’ll buy another jump rope. Maybe I won’t.
Either way, I like knowing that somewhere in the archive of my life there’s a version of me mid-air at a rest stop, suspended between who I was and who I’d become.
And honestly? She looked like she was having a great time.
Categories: Culture, identity, mental health, Psychology, society
psychologistmimi 
Ah Yes Dear Miriam “Special Interests”
Come and go on and off of the Autism
Spectrum True Yet Jumping Rope is Such a
Lifelong Good For Better Balance Agility
And Strength of All Parts
Of Our Body
And Even
As Modern
Science Shows
Jumping And the
Impact on Earth That
Provides Actually Stimulates
Bone Growth Across the Lifespan
Remediating
Potential
Bone Loss
And Muscle Loss
Too as Strength Training
Always Does too Yet Perhaps
What’s Best is Play Slays Fear
And Jumprope may be Play
Across the Life Span
ThiS WaY at
Best Some Way
We Find to at Least
Keep Moving as You Add
Your Steps Every Day in Your
Work-Life too Click Click Click
Of Heels in the Halls
As Of Course
CEO Clicks
Yes Demand
Due Respect
With SMiLes
Keep Clicking
And Perhaps a
Return to the Play
of Jump Rope Yet Sigh
i Was Always too Uncoordinated
to Do It Yet Sigh Perhaps that Was
Just
because
i Didn’t Do it Enough
in Almost Every Area of
Existence a Use or Lose
Proposition of
Human
Potentials
Yet Honestly i just couldn’t
Stand Jumping Rope in one
Place rather Navigate Store
Aisles in Public Dance With
SMiLes
Modernly
Now
so far
so Good
This New
Special Interest
Is With All These
Words Transforming
into SonGS oF mY SoUL
With
Repose
Move and
Repose of
Song Again to Move…
After and
Before the
Dance too
Of
Course
With SMiLes…
Bottom Phrase
iPlay
Slaying
All Illusory
Fears iWing
iFree..:)
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