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I have an … uncomforatble reaction to my peers and other adults engaging with Lego. It's some combination of jealousy and regret, and I've recently started to think there's some grief in there as well. And a lot of mess.
I put down my childhood Lego some time around 14. (I'm very hazy at connecting events to ages and years.) The time I had decided—been forced to, almost, for survival reasons—to go into hard-shell emotionless as much as I could. To leave childhood behind and start working on being an adult. And Lego was a child's toy then, so I had to leave it behind. I wound up the ongoing story I was telling with it, reboxed a portion for my parents to give away, and stashed the rest into deep storage.
From deep storage in my childhood home, through three of mine, until finally giving it all over to my then nephew-in-law. With hindsight, it might have been more suitably done a couple of years earlier, but it was out of my life.
So I see other grown ups enjoying Lego, and feel resentful that I no longer have what was such an important part of my childhood in my life. Surely I could just buy some for myself, like they do? Well, the mess in my head says no.
There's the part that says it's just more stuff in my life that I don't need. Especially when I'm still mostly trying to declutter. The part that says that it's wrong to be spending money on stuff that is just fun and just for me (especially now I have no income). The part that says that if I am going to do something like that, it should at least be creative and skillful, which (to my brain) building a kit from instructions isn't. And I don't have the skill to be creative, because of all the missing decades of development of a vast range of brick types I could never have imagined as a child, techniques that I never learned.
I kind of had a choice to got with the tiny trains or Lego, and went with the tiny trains because they were a more adult thing, a more skillful thing.
I … kind of regret that.
But there's really something that needs examining in that thought that Lego is a child's thing. Because it was so much a childhood thing for me. Something with a sharp, defined line with "childhood" one side, and a clear ending. For reasons.
I don't know if it's safe for me to go back there.
I put down my childhood Lego some time around 14. (I'm very hazy at connecting events to ages and years.) The time I had decided—been forced to, almost, for survival reasons—to go into hard-shell emotionless as much as I could. To leave childhood behind and start working on being an adult. And Lego was a child's toy then, so I had to leave it behind. I wound up the ongoing story I was telling with it, reboxed a portion for my parents to give away, and stashed the rest into deep storage.
From deep storage in my childhood home, through three of mine, until finally giving it all over to my then nephew-in-law. With hindsight, it might have been more suitably done a couple of years earlier, but it was out of my life.
So I see other grown ups enjoying Lego, and feel resentful that I no longer have what was such an important part of my childhood in my life. Surely I could just buy some for myself, like they do? Well, the mess in my head says no.
There's the part that says it's just more stuff in my life that I don't need. Especially when I'm still mostly trying to declutter. The part that says that it's wrong to be spending money on stuff that is just fun and just for me (especially now I have no income). The part that says that if I am going to do something like that, it should at least be creative and skillful, which (to my brain) building a kit from instructions isn't. And I don't have the skill to be creative, because of all the missing decades of development of a vast range of brick types I could never have imagined as a child, techniques that I never learned.
I kind of had a choice to got with the tiny trains or Lego, and went with the tiny trains because they were a more adult thing, a more skillful thing.
I … kind of regret that.
But there's really something that needs examining in that thought that Lego is a child's thing. Because it was so much a childhood thing for me. Something with a sharp, defined line with "childhood" one side, and a clear ending. For reasons.
I don't know if it's safe for me to go back there.
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Date: 2025-02-05 12:18 pm (UTC)