On March 5 2018, I collapsed in my kitchen trying to put away dishes. I was less than 48 hours removed from a major abdominal surgery that would sideline me from work for two weeks. As part of my long and exhausting road to recovery, I was insructed to eat a diet of only liquids in that two weeks; even my childhood favorite cream of chicken soup needed to have the little chicken bits strained out. In my typical fashion, I pushed myself a beyond my limit and experienced a rather unpleasant consequence, a dilemma with which I am deeply familiar. What was disheartening is that trying to put away a single load of clean dishes would qualify as "beyond my limit." I was 28 years old.
In the several minutes it took me to catch my breath on the linoleum floor of my tacky little 1970s galley kitchen, I realized I was going to have to find a way to enjoy myself sitting still. At that time, I was preparing to launch a brand new college marching band program of my own design. I was in a domestically abusive partnership, living halfway across the country from my family and over an hour away from any friends in the state. Sitting still wasn't something I was particulary interested in.
"I had no clue the role crochet would play in my life moving forward, the power it would give me, the seemingly endless well of happiness and inner peace I would find in creating something beautiful, useable, wearable, with my own hands. In a dark and constricting time in my life, a time when my ability to exercise my agency was compromised in ways both known and unknown to me, I could always exercise my agency on a ball of yarn."
In the sweetest recesses of my mind lives a memory that I'm fairly certain is from summer youth orchestra camp when I was in high school. I was sitting on the porch of the little cabin where several girls and I were sleeping, and one of the staff at the facility was teaching a few of us how to crochet. We found time every day that week for crochet on the porch, chatting about anything and nothing, enjoying the warm summer breeze carrying the smell of pine and dirt and dinner preparations. It all came to me there on the kitchen floor, apropos of nothing but my desperate need to not be still while sitting. It was a soothing thing, trying to grasp the wisps of that memory, urging my mind's eye to experience it as clearly as I could. I took several more minutes before deciding I could drive safely to the nearest superstore.
Having fallen in my own home not fifteen minutes before, I felt familiar warning bells go off just from the walk across the parking lot; my body was telling me we weren't making it to the craft section on foot. I clumsily maneuvered a driving cart to the back of the store, found a beginner book that came with a set of five hooks, grabbed a cheap skein, and resolved to channel my restlessness into this hobby that was new and somehow also returning to me from a past life. Though I was clumsy from years without practice, the somatic experience of turning the hook in my hands, . I had no clue the role crochet would play in my life moving forward, the power it would give me, the seemingly endless well of inner peace and joy I would find in creating something beautiful, useable, wearable, with my own hands. In a dark and constricting time in my life, a time when my ability to exercise my agency was compromised in ways both known and unknown to me, I could always exercise agency on a ball of yarn.
Slowly but surely, crochet was going to transform my life for the better. And so far, it hasn't stopped.
