The embarrassing hobby I kept secret until I stopped caring

There's a box under my bed that I don't show people. Nothing dramatic — it's just a shallow wooden box with a glass lid, and inside it are pressed flowers. Dozens of them. Petals laid flat between layers of tissue paper, stems still attached or removed depending on how I was feeling the day I pressed them. Wildflowers from a walk. A rose from a bunch that was already dying. A sprig of heather I found on the side of a hill on a day that needed preserving. I've been collecting them for two years and I have told almost nobody.

This is that post, I suppose. The one where I say it out loud.

I press flowers. It is a hobby that sounds, to my own ears, like something a Victorian child would do or something your grandmother did in the sixties. It is, objectively, an extremely quiet and slightly old-fashioned and genuinely niche thing to spend your free time on. I am a twenty-something woman making short videos on the internet and also secretly pressing wildflowers under heavy art books in my flat, and for a long time those two things felt like they couldn't possibly coexist in the same person without one of them having to apologise for itself.

How it started — the accidental discovery

It began with a walk I almost didn't take. Early September two years ago, one of those bright September afternoons that England produces occasionally and then immediately takes back, and I was on a path through a field and there was a small cluster of something — I still don't know exactly what kind, something pale purple with very fine petals — and I stopped and crouched down to look at it and thought: I don't want to not have this. Which is a strange thought, in retrospect. I picked one stem, put it in my pocket, and walked home.

At home I didn't know what to do with it. It was too pretty to throw away. I laid it between two pages of the heaviest book on my shelf — a large photography book I'd bought secondhand and never looked at more than twice — and put another book on top, and forgot about it for two weeks. When I came back to it, the flower was flat and dry and absolutely perfect, still that pale purple, the petals like tissue paper. I held it up to the light and thought: right, well, apparently I do this now.

I bought the wooden pressing box the following week. I started going on the same walks with different eyes — looking for what I might want to keep. It became, without me deciding it would, a practice.

The specific fear of being seen as odd

I didn't tell anyone. This is the part I want to be honest about, because the secrecy was very deliberate and I think about it a lot now.

I was afraid of what it said about me. Not because I actually think there's anything wrong with pressing flowers — I didn't think that, not really — but because I had constructed a version of myself that felt like it had to be a certain kind of interesting, a certain kind of relevant, a certain kind of with-it. And pressing flowers felt like evidence that I was secretly a bit too quiet and niche and earnest for the persona I was performing. Like if anyone saw the box under my bed, they'd recalibrate. Oh — this is who she actually is. Someone who does something no one asked about in a room by herself.

I know how that sounds. I'm telling you anyway, because I think a lot of people have something like this — a hobby or an interest or a side of themselves that they keep quietly because they've decided it doesn't fit the version of themselves they show. The thing they do in private because they're not sure the public version of them is allowed to also do that.

Be weird, be random, be who you are — that phrase started appearing in my algorithm and I scrolled past it half a dozen times before it actually landed. Because there's a gap between knowing something is true and actually letting yourself live it.

The first time I mentioned it — what happened

I slipped it into a video almost by accident. I was filming my little flat — one of those slow, ambient Sunday videos, very casual, just panning around my space — and the wooden box was on the shelf because I'd been looking at it earlier. I almost moved it before filming. Instead, in the moment, I just mentioned it. "That's my pressing box, I collect pressed flowers, I know it's a bit random." And then I kept filming and uploaded the video and told myself it would be fine.

The comments section was, genuinely, one of the most unexpectedly warm experiences I've had online. Not in a performative way — not people being effusively enthusiastic the way comment sections sometimes are — but in this quiet, recognising way. I do this too. My nan taught me. I have a book just like that. I thought I was the only one. DMs from people showing me their own collections. Someone who had been pressing flowers for fifteen years and had never mentioned it on the internet because they thought it was too niche. Another person who'd just started and used a phone book because they didn't have anything heavy enough.

Nobody thought it was odd. Or if they did, they didn't say so. And the people who responded were responding from a place of recognition, not performance. They weren't impressed by the hobby; they were just relieved to see it named. As if I'd given permission to something they'd been keeping quiet too.

A sensory scene — the quiet of arranging

I want to describe it to you properly, because it's difficult to explain why it's satisfying without the texture of it.

I picked something up on a walk last week — a small sprig of something I found growing through a gap in a wall, nothing identifiable, pale and feathery, the kind of plant no one grows on purpose. I brought it home and laid it on my cutting mat. The smell of fresh-cut green, slightly damp from the morning. I cut the stem to the length I wanted and chose a piece of white tissue paper, then a second sheet, then laid the sprig down and smoothed the petals with the tips of my fingers, very gently, arranging them the way they looked most natural rather than most symmetrical. Pressed another sheet of tissue on top, then a piece of folded card, then the weight.

The whole thing takes maybe five minutes. The result won't be known for two weeks. I have no idea yet if the colour will hold or if the petals will go brown or whether the whole thing will be a disappointment. I do it anyway. There's something in that waiting — the not-knowing, the absence of instant result — that feels like the opposite of the internet, and I think that might be exactly why I love it.

The weirdest parts of you are usually the most recognisable. The thing you kept to yourself is very often exactly the thing someone else needed to hear out loud.

What it's given me permission to do

The pressing isn't the point, really, in the way I think about it now. The point is what it's given me permission to do with the rest of my interests — which is to follow them without checking first whether they're justifiable. To be interested in something because I'm interested in it, without needing to construct a case for why that interest is valid or useful or legible to anyone else.

I keep a paper journal. I like old maps. I have a slightly obsessive relationship with tea and own more varieties than I could sensibly defend. I know the names of more birds than most people my age. None of these things are cool in any conventional sense, and I've stopped needing them to be. The version of me that was performing a certain kind of relevance was exhausting to maintain, and the version underneath her is considerably more interesting, actually. She presses flowers and reads too slowly and walks home a longer way on purpose and doesn't feel the need to explain any of it.

The weirdest parts of you are usually the most recognisable — I've read that sentiment in various forms and it's always sounded like a platitude until it happened to me in a comment section on a video where I mentioned a box of dried flowers. The thing I thought would make me strange was the thing that made the most people say me too. That should probably tell us something about the gap between what we hide and what people actually want to find.

You're allowed to have the niche thing. You're allowed to do it in private or share it or both, on different days, depending on how you feel. You're allowed to be interested in something that nobody else around you is interested in. The hobby you've been slightly embarrassed about is, in almost every case, just a part of you that deserves a little more room. 🤍