(SeaPRwire) – By: Logan Pierce
I swept my arm overhead. Half-moon shape. Side stretch. The ballet instructors of my childhood still knew my name. It had been over a decade since I last took a class. I started alone in the kitchen, clutching the counter in tennis shoes. No mirrors. No barre. But the steps came back. I still knew them. I could still hum the music that used to be paired with each exercise. What hit me harder than the muscle memory was something else entirely. An activity that defined my childhood was now speaking directly to the person I had become. That was the part that floored me.
Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, studies narrative identity. Part of that work involves going back to the distant past and bringing something forward. He hasn’t studied the exact process of revisiting a childhood hobby, but he’s clear about one thing. Bringing back an activity that once made you feel good can be a deeply positive experience. It makes you feel like you’re integrating your life around something that was once really important to you. McAdams sees it as a piece of the self being reassembled. Not a nostalgia trip. A structural act.
Kristen Martin grew up with a grandmother who knitted constantly. Slippers in every color combination. Blankets in all sizes. Her grandmother taught her to crochet in kindergarten. By fourth grade, they’d 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 as an adult, she found the same pattern in herself. She practices at night with the TV on. A wind-down ritual. She loves making things for other people. Just like her grandmother did.
Benjamin Vigeant, 40, works as a social media manager in Chicago. He grew up with a pinball machine in his basement. He stopped playing in his late 20s. Then he and a friend started getting competitive whenever they spotted pinball machines at bars. Eventually, Vigeant started a pinball league in Chicago. “I really enjoy competing, and now there’s a bunch of people competing with me,” he said. This isn’t just about the game. It’s about a competitive impulse that was always there. Lying dormant. Waiting for a version of adulthood that could finally give it room to breathe.
Hollen Reischer, a visiting assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo, frames this through narrative identity. She defines it as “the internalized, evolving story of the self.” It includes the past as we remember it. The present. The future we imagine. Returning to an abandoned childhood hobby, she says, has the potential to engage all three temporal selves at once. It draws on reconstructed memory of what the activity meant to you then. It alters what you are actually doing in the present. And it gestures toward some version of yourself you hope to become.
Somewhere between the knee crack and the half-moon stretch, there’s a preteen version of you still waiting. Between the grandmother’s knitting and the pinball machine glow, she’s been there the whole time. She never stopped loving what she loved. She never stopped trying. She’s just been waiting for the adult version of her to show up in the kitchen or the living room. Pick it back up. Give that old fire a second crack at the stove. The muscle memory is real. The melody is real. The fearlessness is still there. It’s just been waiting for you to stop performing and start playing again.
Author bio: Logan Pierce, an independent business researcher and corporate governance writer on Medium, brings a market-savvy analytical lens to behavioral psychology, narrative identity, and the hidden mechanics of how past experiences shape present selves.