We were poking around thrift stores out in the valley on the weekend (Dalton and PJ are always on the hunt for what I lovingly call 'musical electronics' (old amps, guitars, heads, etc.) while Lochlan looks for vintage hand tools and I just look at everything, but I have my sights set on a 'nice' vintage Cowichan sweater for cold nights by the fire when a blanket and five men don't cut it but finding one in reverse colours (dark body, light colorwork) is a unicorn) and I found a copy of a book called Yarn Harlot.
It seemed vaguely familiar.
Stephanie's was one of the first blogs I ever read, and probably one of the reasons I started writing about my daily life. Something about a peek into someone else's home/day/routine/mindset is comforting, instructional and entertaining all at once. Sometimes we covet what someone else has. Sometimes we feel better about our own relationships, cleaning routine or feelings after reading about someone else's. It's invasive and voyeuristic and delicious, and I've never been one to demure about any of it, while all the while retaining my privacy to a degree that surpasses any level of reason.
Anyway, I am one page in and I love it already. It was $4 on a shelf of otherwise terrible knitting pattern books and maybe the reason it called to me was to remind me that I have this outlet and I am not using it to the fullest? Or maybe to remind me of who I used to be? Excited to sit down, tell you everything, delete the worst parts (sometimes the best parts) and then hit publish as if I had completed my magnum opus, every single day.
Sometimes it's been the only reason I got up in the morning and sometimes I used it to punish myself, the reminder that I haven't done anything to make myself famous or noteworthy, that those who do have a whole team of people lifting them up in the background and I definitely fall squarely into that category, believe it or not.
I recently picked up my knitting again, probably a year ago now, a way to keep my hands engaged. I'm absolutely compulsive about my hands moving. If they're moving, they may as well be writing, drawing, painting, spinning, knitting, sewing, writing or forming clay. You can't always be touching someone, though that will forever and always be my first choice.
I am now almost a couple of months out from the very last pill and physically things are starting to calm down. Emotionally I am the Pacific National Exhibition though, all thrills, chills, delight and horror all at once. That will calm down eventually, maybe now even, since the physical issues are ebbing.
(I am also a couple months out from the heavy-handed and punitive internet embargo that infantilized me right back to the eighties, when the internet wasn't around but the boys' rules were just as miserable.)
So all that is to say thank you for sticking around. Somehow I think it was easier when I had that full-blown psychotic break and went to stay at the hospital with the locks on every door. It was like speed dating. They pumped you full of drugs, asked a lot of questions, then immediately withdrew the drugs, asked many more questions and then suddenly I was home again. This was a years-long drawn-out ridiculous fugue state where I couldn't be anxious no matter how hard I tired but everything else went to shit. I laughed inappropriately at sad things. I got in fights because I couldn't empathize with the things that were important to others. I gained a lot of weight. I wasn't me anymore.
I need to be me, or else who am I?
And spring is a time of renewal and change and reassurance. The lilacs have their tiny buds bursting to come out, the nights are cool but warmer than before and it was light out last even until past seven-thirty, which I exclaimed with great delight in the moment, knitting in hand. I will always have my hands busy. I took my sewing box (it's a Turkish cookie tin) to bed last night and sat up in the middle between Lochlan and Ben with a cat and a flashlight in my lap and pieced together a patchwork cloth that I will then cut into to make a book cover for my paperbacks to live in as I read them (it keeps them nicer in my bag) and to remind me that physical books are as important to care for as my beloved kindle, and I did that until midnight and then I finally turned off my flashlight at midnight and slept until six-thirty.
So normal. So invasive to tell you this. So looking forward to the lilacs this year.