How do I make my special interests come back?

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I used to have vivid and intense interests, but since I got depressed, they've mellowed out. But I like always having something to think about! How do I become interested in things once more?

I had to deal with my depression first. For me, a lot of it came from not doing the right things to recover from daily social stress. I began to demand less of myself socially and to allow myself to play video games by myself for hours every night (my husband was very supportive), look at random things online -- whatever pointless nonesense that calmed me.

Once my anxiety lessened, I then let myself get angry when I wanted to. For me, that's a lot of the time! I know my anger isn't socially acceptable but bottling it up can cause depression, I hear. So I feel the anger, then try to deal with it after the person is gone and I'm alone. I hear exercise can help a lot with processing anger.

I also let myself eat whatever I wanted (basically french fries) and did a lot of oversharing and ranting in my journal and anonymously on my blog.

After a while I stopped turning to the video games and started getting excited about my special interests again. I didn't force it, though. I tend to cycle through a couple different ones (running, drawing, music, languages, writing, knitting) and I wasn't sure what I would want to do. In my case I picked up one I hadn't been doing for over ten years -- drawing! I had been focused on "productive" interests and not honoring my own real desires.

My experience is different from others' I suspect, but maybe something here will give you an idea.

I'm the opposite - since I got happier my special interest has become less important to me. Since 2008 I have been writing endless stories about my special interest, on a continuum kind of thing. Now I'm about a quarter of a way through my 12th or 13th book, and I don't want to leave it unfinished, but now that my special interest (the subject of the stories) is fizzling, it isn't so fun to write them any more. It's almost the same as writing stories about football players - I am not in the last bit interested in football or football players, so I don't write about them. Now it's becoming the same feeling when writing about my special interest; I'm just growing bored of it. I think it's because I am finally out of my rut, I am not so lonely any more, I am out doing things, I have a boyfriend, and pretty soon I will be moving in with him. So my life is changing now, and I feel I don't need my special interests for comfort any more. It's sad, but life goes on.

My special interests vanished in the late January of 2007. I trusted someone for a while until they started to turn on me. I've lost interest in the things that I'm interested in now. I had a very dark mind until the Canada Day of 2009. I've listened to The Kinks on YouTube off and on between Canada Day and the second weekend of the September of 2009. I've decided to wear my hair in a decent manner once again, that weekend. I listened to my favourite band more often. My mum wasn't too happy about it at first, but I've changed for myself and not for her.