Am I brave enough to abandon a hobby?

I've written a couple of times now about wrestling with my involvement in music as a hobby. I've been doing a bit more thinking on this, as part of an ongoing project to get more in touch with myself and what it is I actually want. So, what keeps me involved with music?

I wondered a bit if there's a sunk-cost fallacy at work with it. I've been involved with guitar and songwriting for about 15 years now. I've invested a lot of money in gear over the years. I've made a lot of friends through it. I've made it a part of my identity - if you go to the front page of my capsule, it says, first and foremost, that I am a musician. I wonder if I resist the idea of admitting that I don't really enjoy writing songs anymore because it would be to admit that I'm not the person I've been trying to be?

I had a similar issue with work - I went and got an engineering degree and was never very jazzed about the process. I'm now finally taking steps to be able to teach like I wanted to. But I struggled to admit that I didn't like my original degree because it was a high-value degree(tm) and thus made me a high-value person, a thing that is definitely a real thing to be. There's a certain cool-factor to being a songwriter, and I am proud of some of the music I've created. But I also have to admit that part of the reason I did it was to appear cool, to be a cool person.

Do I actually enjoy the act of writing songs? I'm not so sure that I do. There's another conflict here - I put a lot of pressure on myself to create good music. The songs I make must be beyond reproach so that people like me. They must also be good because I am a songwriter, and for them to be bad would make me a bad songwriter, and that undermines my identity. The perfectionism spoils the enjoyment, so I wonder if I just need to unlearn these patterns of avoidance to recover the joy of the act. I also wonder if there's a practical difference between not enjoying something because I don't like it, vs not enjoying it because of the pressure I put on myself. I'm not enjoying it either way, right?

Another dimension: the thought of leaving songwriting behind is mildly relieving. Is that because I don't like songwriting, or is it because I want to give myself permission to avoid things that stress me out? are those different, at the end of the day.

Yet another thing: On the evening of January 1st this year, I had trouble falling asleep because I was amped about the possibilities for things I could do. I want to learn another language (maybe irish or german), I want to make a game and a handful of programming projects, I want to exercise more and eat healthy and get better at cooking and do more writing. And not one of the things that was keeping me up with excitement was songwriting.

This week, I think I've come to the conclusion that I need to leave songwriting and guitar behind. Not drums - I've experienced actual joy playing cool music for snare drum and drum set over the last couple weeks. But I think I need to just banish my stringed instruments to the closet for a while, until such time as I feel a spark to play them, rather than a pressure that I must. Maybe I'll even sell it all when I downsize this summer, to be re-bought if I ever feel the need to play a guitar again.