To those who left the hobby and then returned....

I got into dolls just because I like cute things. And bjds were the next step in doll collecting. But I stopped taking photos, and mostly kept them to myself because of someone spreading rumours about me. -_-;; Kinda ruins the enjoyment of it.

I got back into it because 3D printing is so promising, that I might be able to make my own doll now! And dolls are a lot cheaper than when I started. There are a lot more options for affordable dolls, which is great!

 

I've been in the hobby foe 10 years, starting when I was 20 and half way through College. I was in and out online, still totally obsessed but unable to do much because of a strict houshold budget after college.

But then in 2016 I fell away from the hobby because of a serious undiagnosed mental illness. I stopped even really looking at my dolls for a long long time. I still have a lot of material and half finished projects that just got packed away and forgotten about.

But this year I sought out help, got on some meds, and then the quarantine happened. Suddenly I had a lot of energy and time to do whatever I wanted! I started out customizing monster high dolls, which sparked my love of these dolls once again. Its been wonderful, I missed creating things.

 

A little different, but for those who did return, what were the steps you took to re-love or reintroduce yourself to your doll again? Such as new faceup, or things of the sort?

 

@Vakarian Yes, for some of them I did a different faceup. In fact, for several, I completely redid their entire characters, new faceups, new outfits, the works. Now, I just love having them out and being able to look at them every day.

 

For me, it was simply a matter of dusting them off and changing their clothes for me to fall in love with playing with them all over again. My Crew is set in their personalities, so it was fun to rediscover who they were all over again.

Ryu

 

I stopped caring about the community and the drama within it years ago and ultimately stopped interacting with other doll people completely. I never sold my dolls, I just didn't do anything with them.

Thinking about letting a few go this year to fund new purchases though. I've been inspired to shell some newer characters of mine and work on old ones too because of reading so much these past 2 years honestly. It fuels my own imagination and makes me wanna pick up the hobby again. At least to an extent. I still don't really care about getting back in touch with the people in this community (beyond casual forum interactions maybe) *shrugs*

The whole recast thing has also majorly spoiled things for me. I don't trust people anymore with secondhand purchases and I don't support theft, sooo yeah. There's that.

 

I'd been following the hobby since the early 2000's. I'd been a MLP and transformer collector for years, and a lot of the older MLP collectors began to really get into BJDS's in about 2013-14. I got my first in 2015 and was active for about 18 months. But then a serious knock to my mental health, and there on my creativity completely threw me out of the hobby. I joined because I loved the crafting side of things and i just couldn't do it.

After a few years I quit my job last December after deciding i needed a clean slate. I had 3 months off at the beginning of this year and I got my DZ boy out who was the last doll I had bought before i got ill and really enjoyed sorting his wig and his eyes which i finally got him and remembered why I enjoyed it so much in the first place. However I think because of linked memories I wasn't connecting to him at all and yesterday I just wiped his face and re-did him and now I love him.

I think that's the beauty of these, they are so versatile if you're like "I don't like your face any more" you just make them a new one!

 

For a second, I thought I was imagining things when I came back in the hobby and noticed that second hand dolls were cheaper.

I took a break from the community in 2016. I kept my dolls and continued to buy things for them but I wasn't speaking to anyone or buying new dolls. My dolls except for 2 of them, were always kept wrapped up in the closet. A lot of this revolved around college, joblessness, weight loss and my boyfriend breaking up w/ me.

I came back because last year because I missed it and realized I had no outlets for stress besides baking-which was making me fat

 

As with the case of a lot of other fellow users, I took an actual hobby break while I was adjusting to life in university. It didn't last very long, only about 2 years and back in my jobless, "I saved up money from holidays and birthday presents" days, I would have the privilege of affording one doll per approximate year anyway.

For several years now (maybe 4-5), I've taken a break from the social side of the hobby due to the rampant recast issues and the frequent, frustrating, often hopeless debates with people about it. The entire part of me that enjoyed interacting with the BJD community sloughed right off, and only now am I making a concerted effort to revive my love of making new friends.

Arguably I never got a total hiatus, as I like keeping up with the most general of doll news and I have maintained personal friendships with other fellow hobbyists. My social participation on platforms like these just comes and goes in waves.

 

I took a break for about 4-6 years. I started in high school and stopped during uni. The expense of the hobby was what made me take a break and I was a broke kid. I finished school and landed a good job at a good company. I've only picked up the hobby again this spring. My local community was cool, but we all lived far away from each other so meetups were really difficult to set up.

 

This topic really hits home for me. I've been a little on and off with the hobby for a number of years now. I started collecting bjds when I was in high school, and the expense was just too much for me. I sold all my dolls before university, but I ended up getting another one my sophomore year of college. But I ended up abandoning the hobby again because I got busy with school and work. Now that I've graduated and I'm job hunting (and lowkey trapped inside because of quarantine), getting back into the hobby has been a great creative outlet for me! I've been making clothes and eyes, and it honestly feels pretty good to see the finished results! I'm glad to be back :-)

 

I left for money reasons, resin paranoia and because all the sizes of dolls I had weren't really clicking with me.

I am paranoid of resin because of the color changing etc on such an expensive doll, as well as potential breakage. I would be gutted to spend hundreds or more on a doll only to have it look awful in a year or so. I still worry about that, but my mind was eased seeing some discolored dolls and they didn't look as bad as I thought it would. As for breakage, I am careful so I need to just get over it.

I finally found a size of doll that I am very happy with and now I feel the floodgates have opened!

 

That's just always how it seems to be, isn't it?

 

i've bounced in and out of the hobby a lot over the past 7 years, but my last hiatus was mostly due to cost and just not feeling inspired by the dolls i have now. i got really into collecting transformers in the meantime, and after a while it just made me want to get back into bjds again. it seems like a lot's changed over the past 2 years, so everything feels new again.

i'm still having trouble connecting with my current dolls, but hopefully that'll change?

 

I didn't really "leave" as such. I just stepped back for a while after submerging myself in the hobby in order to escape everything else. I sat my one guy on a shelf in another room and focused on other things for a couple years.

I came back in 2016 after losing the pet rats that had kind of stolen my attention at that time, amongst other losses and life events that hit me pretty hard. It was a similar kind of push that originally brought me into the hobby in 2012, when a relative was hospitalised with an illness [they're going strong now]. In the short 4 years since coming back, I've gone from 1 doll to currently awaiting my... 7th. Oops.

But I'm still not quite as active as I was. I keep taking extended 'breaks' from my dolls, but this imminent arrival is a different scale. I'm hoping I find them more accessible. They're a trial doll; if they successfully break me out of this rut, I'm thinking about reviving the collection all as the same size.

 

I don't think I entirely left the hobby since my interest in BJDs are kind of tied to my general love of several kinds of dolls, which I technically never stopped collecting during my last BJD hiatus. But I did recently log back into DoA for the first time in maybe 2.5 years and definitely let my one poor BJD (AiL mini Alice/Aya sharing a body) clothes-less on my doll shelf during that time.

I greatly cut back on my activity in dolls and this community (and pretty much all of my hobbies) because of grad school. Grad school stress sort of consumed my life in between achieving candidacy and defending my final degree. Honestly, losing my hobbies probably wasn't a healthy thing to do mentally.

But grad school did eventually come to an end. I was glad to finally make a dress for my Alice as soon as I turned in my thesis!! So now I'm working slowly toward crafting more outfits and accessories for my one BJD girl and I also REALLY want to resume sculpting a SD-sized man doll I started in the first year of grad school. I was so happy to see that the BJD making sub forum is so active here upon my return (since I totally missed the Joint merging with DoA during my hiatus)

I lost myself for 4-5 years studying for a degree for my career, so time to develop better work life balance skills and to get back to things I find relaxing and undeniably fun!!

 

I watched doll photos and read bjd forums for several years, until I bought my first doll in 2012. But times were difficult for me then,
I was not at all confident in myself and my abilities. I wanted to do makeup and sew clothes for the doll myself, but couldn't do anything. People close to me said that my doll looks terrible (not even because of what I did to her, they just hated her mold and called her ugly). All this finished me off and I didn't want to do this anymore.
But a couple of years ago, with the
release of new dolls, I again became interested in this hobby. Now everything is well. I have few dolls which I love and I have no more toxic people in my environment.
I am also happy for everyone who, in spite of everything, managed to stay in the hobby.

 

I left the hobby for around 2 years from the end of 2017 to early 2020.
Not really intentional. I just had a lot of stress at the time.

The three major contributors were as follows.
I locked down my Instagram because of an online stalker (unrelated to BJDs). It felt really unsafe to use my usual handle for several months. I did make a second account but it was not the same. My online presence evaporated because I had so little drive to post anything.
In the midst of all this stalker stuff, I lost my job and moved back home. All my dolls were packed into a carrying bag and honestly, I can't remember if they ever emerged...
At this time my grandpa's health was also bad. We spent a great deal of time at his house taking care of him and I just didn't have time for myself. Unfortunately he passed away in mid-2018.
All these things happening in under a year resulted in a severe lack of motivation for all my hobbies.

I do think that a few factors helped re-spark my interest in the hobby this year.
The lock-down had me hanging out on Facebook frequently and I rediscovered all the hobby groups I had joined.
I found out about April Story having a sale and decided to check them out since Diana had been on my original wish list.
I reorganized my room and finally decided to display my dolls. I then realized that they were nowhere near where I wanted them to be hahaha. This led me to wanting to work on them again!
I also think that joining this forum adds to my enjoyment of this hobby in a weird social but antisocial sort of way

TLDR: Life happens and sometimes we just need to take a breather from everything.

 

Got into the hobby with my ex in 2015. I’ve talked about her all over this forum, and she had an account, but it has one post, from 2016, and no activity since. I got out of it when we broke up, and all my dolls were a reminder of a very harmful point in my life, and a storyline that never belonged to me. I then got privilege-guilt. I don’t pay for my own rent, food, car or school. My friends/gf do it for most/all of those things. I felt kind of bad, buying luxury items worth more than their rent.

I got back into it when my gf saw my dolls and got excited, just before quarantine. So I’m trying to shake the saviour complex. If friends need help, and like a lunch or a tank of gas, then I help, because I can. I have savings for emergencies. But no one wants me and my weird guilt complex to decide their financials are mine to fix. So I’m going to instead enjoy my hobby. Reselling/recharacterizing all the dolls I bought for that storyline gave me a fresh slate and the joy back.

 

I first joined the hobby in 2006 when I was still in high school and got my first full doll in 2008-2009? around the time I graduated and became VERY active I want to say in 2014-2015...I left the hobby mainly due to money, moving around a lot..and losing/selling most of my dolls...I don't even have the doll that's in my icon anymore! I'm slowly trying to get back into it due to being more stable but it'll take a while to build my crew back up again....