The beauty of letting your obsessions go

A bit of Manifesting Generator wisdom from me to you: You don’t have to be in love with the same things for the entirety of your life. You don’t have to be defined forever by something you were really into a decade ago.

It’s OK to have obsessions fade out over time and be subsumed by new ones. And they might come back to you when you’re ready to love them obsessively again.

There’s really something wonderful in letting your obsessions go when you’re no longer feeling them.

This can be hard when all the people in your orbit associate you with that thing — that one band or show or color or animal or whatever that makes them think of you every time they see it.

When I was a teen, for some reason I decided I loved frogs. And because my family knew this, everyone bought me frog-related tchotchkes for so long, so far past my actual passing interest in frogs, that I started to hate frogs.

11 years ago, my cookbook Pierogi Love was published. And though I will stand by pierogies for life and am eternally grateful to all who continue to tell me how much they love the book, I’m super happy not to be thinking about pierogies 24/7/365 these days. I don’t think about them very much at all, honestly!

(I’m also grateful to no longer be on social media so I don’t have to see the same damn pierogi meme — yes, these exist — sent to me five million times by all my well-meaning friends.)

Right now, I’m learning this lesson again through Broadway musicals.

When CATS: The Jellicle Ball opened off-Broadway in 2024, I knew I had to snatch up a ticket immediately. Cats was one of the shows that sparked my love of musicals, along with Phantom and Les Mis, as a young nerd in the late ‘80s. And though I stopped listening to the soundtrack once I was out of my teens, and that movie did it no favors, I never lost my love for the show. It just went dormant.

So I went to experience it on my own. And I felt a lightning bolt revelation watching that totally loopy Broadway synth fever-dream show merge with the attitude, athleticism, and pageantry of ballroom. I remembered exactly why I loved Cats to begin with and how I could love it anew.

Lightning struck twice when I saw it again on Broadway a few weeks ago. And that bolt has re-lit the fires of my overall musical obsession once more. Now I’m revisiting Hamilton, which, WHEW, if you did not know me in my full-blown Hamildays. . . that’s a whole other story. Maybe one told over one of my many Hamilton cocktail recipes.

For a while, I had to let Hamilton go. I had to shelve it away in the cabinets of my brain and heart. I needed to give myself space and time away from it after I lived it, breathed it, created from its inspiration, and let it consume me for four years.

Otherwise, I’d start to resent and hate it like I did with frogs back in the day. And I could feel the bitterness creeping in, the way I felt about pierogies after so much food writing burnout and disappointment and diminished expectations for a cookbook career. (Again, another story!)

So now I’m reading Lin-Manuel Miranda’s biography. I’m listening to the cast album again on road trips. I’m getting the songs stuck in my head and running through them when I can’t sleep.

I never stopped loving these musicals. I never stopped loving Pee-wee Herman. But I had to pivot and find new interests to fill me up with excitement and energy and inspiration.

So if there’s a part of you that feels draining and no longer like who you are right now, give yourself permission to shelve it for a while. You don’t have to be defined by it forever. It will be there when you’re ready to embrace it again.

And if you don’t know what a Manifesting Generator is…

I could tell you in Hamilton terms, and I can also tell you directly and explain if you are one, and how it affects every aspect of your day-to-day experience.

See, very single one of us is wired in a specific way to feel our best, and we all have specific cues we can follow to get to that place. It’s not a fantastic coincidence. It’s EXACTLY how you are designed to be.

That’s what HUMAN DESIGN is all about, and I now offer a three-part series of sessions to help you understand this self-awareness system and how it works.

I’ll break it all down for you in simple language and give you actionable ways to work with your design and incorporate it into your daily life — instead of going against the flow with habits that don’t serve you.

Start with the Human Design Download: a 30-minute session that covers the essentials of your energy type, strategy, authority, and profile.