small, insignificant things
No sewing machine. Part ordered. It sits there quiet and redundant. And I still feel sad about this.
A MATERIALS INTERLUDE, WHILE THE MACHINE SITS SILENT
THE SEWING MACHINE (quiet, unplugged, waiting on a screw the size of an eyelash): I can hear everything from here. I just can't do anything about it.
THE RED WOOL (new, unbothered, thoroughly enjoying itself): That must be difficult for you.
THE SEWING MACHINE: It is, actually.
THE RED WOOL: I wasn't being sarcastic. I meant that.
ALPACA (from a drawer, somewhere, slightly wounded): Nobody's touched me in three days and nobody's said anything sad about that.
THE RED WOOL: You had your turn.
ALPACA: I had a purl disaster is what I had.
THE RED WOOL: And yet here you both are. Bitter, in a drawer.
THE SEWING MACHINE: I'm not in a drawer. I have my own table.
THE RED WOOL: Even worse, then.
Today is an incredibly rainy, stormy day. I visited a possible venue for The Maker's Table: the local library. Handing over the "press pack" I'd made with love, machine embroidery, and beautiful, high-quality printer paper, the programming managers were highly encouraging, and interested in the offering. They also gave me a tour of the beautiful building — parts of it dating to 1902, the newer sections built free of charge by the community. What an amazing resource. I immediately want to commit to something bigger for them than the one-off session I'd originally proposed. On the other side of this: the ten personalised emails I sent yesterday, with digital copies of the same press pack, have not yielded a single response.
I confided in two friends that I still find these interactions so very hard, so very nerve-wracking, and sometimes excruciating. Both emailing cold, and visiting cold, to ply my particular brand of snake oil. But this encounter was none of those things. They were interested. I was keen, and could see it actually happening. And best of all, the drive home — mildly jubilant — was no more than ten minutes. I've driven long distances sitting with rejection, many a time, so this pairing of acceptance and quick hop home was a pleasing novelty.
In other news, I find myself adopting a thinking-with-textiles way of life — sometimes on purpose, sometimes just reflexively — as an actual way to live. When I feel stress or anxiety, which is often, I pick up the knitting. There's something uniquely soothing about knitting, whereas hand embroidery gives me ideas, and somehow challenges me a little — in a good way. With machine work, I tend to want audiobooks or podcasts playing, and I'm far more focused on making everything hang together correctly.
With the rain, no paid work this week, and my son making his restlessness known, I've done a fair bit of knitting today, and I'm very, very satisfied with how the piece is turning out — and with how it acts like a mild anxiolytic, minus the unpleasant side effects of the pharmaceutical kind. I want to keep touching this pleasing red piece of wool, looking at it, and chipping away at it.
So tonight, having also done my hand-stitching for the book club, I'm ready to say goodbye to this glum day: a John le Carré audiobook (I can't read and knit at the same time), and bed, with soothing lighting.
This is my new life. I don't know how I kept mentally well before all of this. Perhaps the brutal answer is that I didn't "keep mentally well" — that I wasn't in a good place. Yes. That's it.
