Childhood relics lie scattered around my house: a cute panda, a bejeweled dragon, an elaborate mansion. My brother’s prized possession: the 7,541-piece Millennium Falcon, which took us over a month to complete. I hadn’t touched LEGO since high school began, but the sudden freedom of a senior year winter break and an impulsive buy of The Botanical Garden from the Galleria brought me back to the workbench, gifting me a few manic days of nonstop building.

I’ve never aspired to become an architect. I’m not in love with Ninjago, or Star Wars, or Batman. I’ve especially never liked people telling me what to do, and if someone left me a 300-step list of instructions, it would get torn to shreds and burnt. But then, why do I love the feeling of the plastic bricks against my finger pads so much?

At first, I thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s old adage: “life is a journey, not a destination.”With this in mind, I sought to maturely take my time while building, slowly spinning the structure after every few steps to appreciate my progress. Although I did admire its intricate design—in awe of whichever genius god had conceived it and written out the instructions for us mere mortals to recreate—the slow building process felt odd and worse, pretentious. I didn’t truly see the point of spending precious seconds staring at my work, pretending that I saw meaning in the unfinished bricks. I was playing “adult.”

So perhaps Emerson was wrong, and life was really about the destination. Perhaps I was rushing towards the finish line, the chance to proudly display the work on my upright piano and take pictures to send to my friends. I quickly dismissed this notion with the ease of any procrastinating teenager: we never work for an end goal without an immediate deadline. 

Finally, I wondered if my sudden need to build was a product of a pressure I felt from my brother. When we were younger, we always built LEGO sets together. He’d built some on his own as well, but I had not. My impulse to complete this project may have stemmed from the need to prove that LEGO was my hobby as well, not just my brother’s. This thought scared me the most. He’s my younger brother, there shouldn’t ever be a reason for me to compete with him. No matter what stereotypes about a certain genders’ preferred pastimes abound the world, I shouldn’t compare myself to my sibling to defy them.

I guiltily continued putting the pieces together. Shame had me rush-rush-rushing to complete the project, eager to push the memory of betrayal far behind me. But I realized, the rush-rush-rush was the most fun I had. The simple act of speeding through the steps. That’s all I wanted. Back to my childhood self, when the only thing that I cared for was speed, when flipping the pages as fast as lightning made me feel like a superhero.

With the Botanical Garden finished, I finally understood. It was all a hobby needed to be — anything that made me feel like my youngest self, living out the happiest days of my youth, even as a high schooler. There’s no need to satisfy outside expectations or do something to seem grown-up. Everyone just needs a way to bring back the panda or dragon or mansion of their childhood fantasies, piece by piece by piece.