Keep the things you love
I had a brief conversation about this with a friend, and so, oh well... here we are. There is a script of sort that gets handed to children at some point, usually without ceremony, and it goes roughly like this: grow up, be responsible, put away the things that do not serve a practical purpose, and become a functional adult with appropriate hobbies that can be explained at dinner parties without anyone raising an eyebrow.
Drawing, writing, making up stories, playing games: no, no, these are childish things meant for children. Eventually, you are expected to leave them behind. And if you don't, well... you are told that you will, eventually, when you really grow up.
...I have thought about this a lot, and I think it is wrong.
Let me start with drawing, because it is the clearest example I know and the one my friend brought up. Think about this: every child draws. Without exception, without self-consciousness, without stopping to wonder whether their proportions are correct or their perspective is off (and oh boy mine was awful). A child handed a crayon will cover every available surface in approximately four minutes and feel nothing but satisfaction about this. Then something happens... it happens gradually and it happens to almost everyone. The child gets older and becomes aware that drawing is something some people do well and some people do not, and they look at their own work and decide they are in the second category, and they stop.
Not because they stopped enjoying it, no, because they learned to be embarrassed by it. Because someone, directly or through the general ambient pressure of growing up, communicated to them that doing something imperfectly as a hobby is not a good enough reason to keep doing it.
This is one of the quieter forms of damage we do to people, and we do it constantly, and we dress it up as practicality.
Well, fuck that. With a big strawberry on the top.
The expectation is not just that you should be good at something to pursue it. It is deeper than that. It is that certain kinds of pursuits simply do not belong to adults: that playing video games is something you age out of, that writing stories for fun is something you do until real responsibilities arrive and displace it, that caring intensely about fictional worlds and imaginary characters is a phase rather than a personality. The word "childish" gets deployed like a verdict, and most people accept it, and something in them quietly dies.
I think this is a tragedy every single time it happens...
It does not matter how old you are. It does not matter whether you are any good. If something brings you genuine joy, if it is the thing you think about when you are doing something else, if it is how you make sense of the world or process your feelings or simply pass an afternoon in a way that feels worthwhile: you are allowed to keep it. You are allowed to pursue it seriously. You are allowed to find other people who feel the same way and build something with them!
That last part is important. Yes, it's quite ironic coming from an introvert like me but, really: find the people.
Because here is what happens when you do.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was, by most practical metrics, not a success story. He lived most of his life in poverty in Providence, Rhode Island, published almost exclusively in pulp magazines, and died in 1937 at 46 with almost no recognition and certainly no money. He was also, in his spare time, one of the most committed correspondents in the history of American letters. He wrote an estimated 100,000 letters across his lifetime.
Let that sink in for a second. Not emails. Letters. By hand, at length, to a sprawling network of writers, poets, and enthusiasts who shared his obsessions and his love for what he called weird fiction!
He initiated his friendship with Clark Ashton Smith in 1922 by writing him a fan letter praising his poetry. Smith, who was already an established poet in California, wrote back. The two of them exchanged 330 letters over the next fifteen years, covering everything from their creative philosophies and current projects to their shared admiration for cosmic scale, the strange, and the macabre. They never met in person. Not once. They built one of the most generative literary friendships of the twentieth century entirely through correspondence, across a continent.
Smith added the god Tsathoggua and the wizard Eibon to what would eventually be called the Cthulhu Mythos. He wrote stories using Lovecraft's Necronomicon. Lovecraft wrote stories referencing Smith's Hyperborean mythology. The worlds were different but they pointed at each other, and readers could feel the depth created by two distinct imaginations working in conversation rather than isolation.
Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was part of the same circle. When Howard's character Friedrich Von Junzt read Lovecraft's fictional Necronomicon in one of his stories, Lovecraft reciprocated by referencing Howard's equivalent ancient tome in two of his own. It was, essentially, the 1930s version of writers tagging each other in creative work. August Derleth, who first contacted Lovecraft as a teenager, would later found Arkham House specifically to keep Lovecraft's work in print after his death, ensuring the whole thing survived long enough for the rest of us to find it. Robert Bloch, who would go on to write Psycho, was seventeen years old when he began corresponding with Lovecraft. Lovecraft wrote back. He took the kid seriously. Bloch killed off a Lovecraft-inspired character in one of his stories as a joke, and Lovecraft's response was to write Bloch into his next story and have him meet a genuinely horrible end.
They were, in other words, having fun!
None of this was a career, for most of them, for most of their lives. It was a group of people who cared about the same strange things, who took each other seriously, who built something together out of letters and pulp stories and mutual enthusiasm. And what they built became one of the most enduring and influential bodies of weird fiction in the history of the medium, a shared universe that writers are still contributing to nearly a century later.
That is what happens when people are allowed to keep the things they love and find other people who love them too.
So... if you are someone who draws even though you were told to stop. If you write stories that live in notebooks nobody else reads. If you play games or build worlds or care about fictional characters with an intensity that other people find puzzling: you are not behind on growing up. You are doing exactly what you should be doing.
Find your circle. Write your letters. Build your mythos.
And ignore anyone who tells you it is time to put it away. They are wrong, and they have always been wrong.