Using Hobbies to Kill My Depression

This defo won't work for everyone, but I realized at the beginning of this year a lot of my depressive weights had lifted and I believe it was because I buried myself in hobbies more aggressively. 

A little back story, I grew up home-schooled in the South and my only friends were kids from church. That produces a lot of bad habits and unsightly quirks.

"Ok, so you were a weirdo, so what?"

Yes I was extremely weird and I still am, HOWEVER, there's more to it. My brand of home-schooling was perhaps the worst of the worst. My mother, who was meant to be my teacher, had health complications four days out of every week, and more importantly, she didn't know how to teach. She was also very lazy and let me skip entire sections of my curriculum. There were a lot of "free days" where I didn't do any school at all.

I owe my depression and social anxiety to this long and uncomfortable period of life, during which I discovered I could never achieve anything no matter how hard I tried. It took me five years after "graduating" high school to realize I could actually finish things I started and most importantly, enjoy learning. 

It started with writing--I've always been a writer, but this time I got more serious about it, like researching and obsessing over what I had in my brain. While I was doing that, I started to doodle more and tried to learn how to draw seriously. Then I had a go at animation and I still do it today! Even tho it looks like garbage, it's still fun to me. I tried air-dry clay this summer and that turned out interesting... I haven't tried that one again yet hehe... Then I became obsessed with a true crime case that TikTok/YouTube/Podcasters hadn't picked up on yet (I hope they never do), and I researched every little bit of information I could by using newspaper archive sites and learning about the town the crime took place in. I've even gotten into digital art and creating designs for print-to-order sites. 

It's not a life of work that needs to be acknowledged by others but a personal pursuit of stimulation and knowledge gathering. Although I yearn for my writing in particular to be critiqued and corrected, at the end of the day I greatly enjoy just being able to create with words.

I wonder if you have experienced something similar and how rediscovering interests/hobbies on a different level has changed your life?

me as i was typing all that