How Your Hobbies Can Help You Through Hard Seasons

There’s something about hobbies that feels almost sacred to me. They show up when we need them most.

Music has always been mine. What started as a hobby became my career, which is both a gift and a complicated thing. When your hobby becomes your livelihood, it changes your relationship with it. For the past five years, I’ve felt a little removed from music. Not disconnected exactly, but not leaning on it the way I used to.

When I was younger, song lyrics were how I understood myself. A random track would come on and suddenly I would realize, oh… that’s what I’m feeling. The words would name what I couldn’t. Music was my emotional translator.

Years of therapy later, and after making emotions part of my professional world, I don’t rely on music the same way. I can identify what I’m feeling. I have tools. I can sit with grief or anger or confusion without needing lyrics to tell me what’s happening inside. And yet, every once in a while, music still amazes me.

Today was one of those days.

I’m on vacation with friends, but I chose to take time for myself to process my uncle’s death. This wasn’t the first time I’ve felt the grief since he passed, but it felt especially present. In the past, I would have used social time to numb out. Stay busy. Stay distracted. Pretend I was fine. That doesn’t work for me anymore.

So I stepped away. I wrote down what I felt in my heart. I even posted on my personal social media about my uncle and about some physical struggles I’ve been walking through these past few months. Five years ago, I never would have done that. I would have swallowed it, smiled, and gone back to my group of friends.

What happened next felt almost magical.

Right after I posted, one of my favorite artists, Dermot Kennedy, announced a new album and released the first single. The single is called “Funeral.” The album is titled “The Weight of the Woods.”

My maiden name, and my uncle’s last name, is Woods.

I just sat there staring at my phone.

I like to believe that our loved ones can find ways to reach us, even when they’ve passed. And through music, the language that has always carried me, I felt connected.

The song, written from his own story and his own metaphors, somehow put words to what I was feeling. Yes, he’s likely referencing literal woods. But for my cousin and me, there is also the weight of the Woods. The weight of our dads. Their lives, stories, and legacy.

I texted my cousin, and we shared that moment together. Grief softened into connection. Music did what it has always done for me: it met me right where I was.

Whether or not you believe in signs, when we slow down enough to feel, the world has ways of meeting us, especially through the hobbies and activities we love. It could be through music or movement; through cooking a meal, gliding down a mountain on a snowboard, or reading a book at just the right time. The hobbies we love aren’t trivial. They are places where meaning lives. They are teachers if we’re willing to listen and givers of gifts if we’re open to receiving.

At Get In Tune, we use music in therapy, and we also help clients rediscover the hobbies and practices that speak to them personally. Healing doesn’t always come in a clinical form. Sometimes it arrives in a song title that feels impossibly meant for you at the moment.

There is a lot of darkness in the world right now, and it’s easy to get swallowed by it. But there is also guidance, connection, and light woven into ordinary moments. We just have to give ourselves permission to pause long enough to notice.

I hope you have something in your life that shows up for you like this. And if you don’t yet, I hope you seek it out, whether it be through a higher power, friends, family, and/or hobbies!