I first started glowsticking in my junior year of high school. I joined the stuy rave club, now known as stuy flow. It took me a really long time to learn even the most basic tricks - the 2 beat and 3 beat weaves.

To give some context, the 3 beat weave is the go-to glowsticking move that is used as a transition between a LOT of glowsticking tricks, especially for beginners. It also requires you to spin the glowsticks in a sort of hard to understand pattern for beginners, and it often results in a lot of bruises. It took me 2 full weeks of hitting myself, and going to the club nearly every single day after school. At the time, it was the hardest test of raw will power and persistence in my life.

When I finally learned the move, I was ecstatic. All of the bruises felt like they were for something, and I had something to show to my friends for the experience I went through. I got to see the smiles of the people who had been with me teaching the move the entire time. It all felt like it was worth it.

I kept learning new riskier and fancier tricks after that. I practiced to perform at the school-wide shows with the other club members. I became a senior member and started teaching new members who came into the club. I became the director of the next show. I made more friends day by day within the club. I felt like there was a progression in my life not just with glowsticking, but with my life satisfaction. I had more friends and I had actual responsibilities which made me feel like I mattered.

After I graduated high school, I mostly fell off when it came to practicing glowsticking. Here and there I tried to teach classes in the city, make videos, or just spin fire poi with friends. For the most part, though, I focused on school. The compute science coursework I had in school became the new task I had to focus my persistence and energy on. Glowsticking became more of a stress relieving hobby for me. I did also perform at a couple of talent shows to raise money for UNICEF as well, so it felt like I was using it to give back to the community.

I graduated in 2018 and have been trying to keep up my glowsticking and flow arts. I’ve transitioned into doing less glowsticking and more poi spinning ( I don’t need to be as flashy, since it’s just for fun ). I bought triple staffs, attended flow festivals like fluggleburgh and kinetic fire. I actually got to meet a lot of people in the community, and I’d like to think I made a little bit of a name for myself teaching a class at fluggleburgh and teaching classes at Carnegie mellon university. I also briefly attempted to start up a juggling club at my office in Google Pittsburgh. Flow arts somehow never managed to leave me after all of these years, and my props are sitting in my closet ready to be picked up today.

But today, I just don’t feel like learning it anymore. I just wrote out a brief history of my experience with flow arts, and chances are if you’re reading this you’ve seen me perform at some point. Maybe you think I’m insanely good and flashy, maybe you think I’m an amateur, or maybe you’re wondering why I even got into this in the first place. The point of this all is that most people only ever get to see the good side of my experience.

What people don’t see is me practicing in my home or in my room. I attempted to show off this side of myself on instagram for a while. I consistently would post videos of me juggling or participating in challenges. It was meant to give people an insight into what it’s like to practice every day for something. I hoped it would give people a glimpse of the hard part of it, and would hopefully inspire other people to pick up the challenge. I even saw a small growth in my instagram following from all of the videos I posted publicly.

At a glance, it might seem like this all is working as intended. I’m gaining a following, and my friends get to see me practicing so they appreciate it all, right? Not so.

There were a lot of stressful unintended consequences of me posting these videos online. First off, when I started posting these videos, I actually had already accumulated a decently sized number of new tricks that I could show off. I was able to sustain putting out new videos and learning new things pretty well. Things started to break down when I was pushing up against the limit of how fast I could learn things.

For reference, in order to master 3 ball juggling, it takes the average person somewhere around 15-20 hours. I posted one video where I made a montage of me juggling clubs. In order to juggle 3 clubs consistently, expect to take another 20 hours. This meant that every waking moment I had outside of work, I was in between juggling learning sessions at home or at the CMU juggling club. Admittedly, this was pretty fun for a while.

After a while though, learning juggling becomes incredibly frustrating. Imagine if you had to try some hundreds of times to throw a bunch of things in the air and catch them, and every time you failed, you had to pick them up, focus, and try again. Now imagine doing that for 20+ hours to learn the basic 3 object juggling pattern.

The problem is that it is just not worth it for the amount of time and frustration you have to put in. The juggling example is relatable because at some point, most people have at least tried to juggle. For other more advanced flow arts, it was actually a lot worse that 20 hours because the moves just get more and more nuanced. There are fewer people to teach you, and you have to often go out of your way to festivals or to meetups just to get a routine that will maybe eventually guide you to the trick. This means sacrificing your own personal time with friends, or taking time off of work. Not to mention you don’t have any metric of if you’re doing it right or how long it will take you to finally learn the trick.

I still spin poi and juggle occasionally, but I quit actively sitting in my room trying to learn crazier and crazier tricks. This doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the art form as much as I used to - I still watch videos all the time and follow a bunch of spinners on instagram. It just means I want to take the time from learning those would-be moves and put the time and energy into focusing on new hobbies like writing blog posts.