New Wave

I’d like to say that this new wave of depression all started with a really bad day.  This isn’t my first dance with depression, and I have struggled with anxiety my entire life, but sometime in mid December I had a really really bad day.  I kept running the events over in my head, breaking more each time, and telling myself I shouldn’t be so broken about just a bad day.  In truth it was more than a bad day.  I’d been having more bad days for a long time, and this was just the tipping point.

It’s such a slow and slippery slope sometimes.  Bad habits in thought, diet, exercise, combined with my natural anxiety can combine into perfect storms of depression.  I mean, I medicate myself daily to manage just the static in my head, so it’s not unbelievable that I would react badly to a series of bad times.  I do a pretty good job, and I care a lot about my mental health.  I know the anxiety exists and I try to manage it, so I can be there for my family, so I can enjoy my life.  But I had been barely holding on for a while, and that day all my triggers all fired all at once.  This just snapped me in half, but I was already cracked in so many places that snapping me didn’t take that much effort.  It was a day tailor made to break me.

So, laying in my bed, paralyzed with anxiety, sadness, anger, fear, I drew a line in the sand.  I did not want to live like this, and so I needed help.

A friend of mine had seen through some of my facebook posts into the lurking darkness and had low-key messaged me months ago recommending a therapist that had helped her a lot when she went through some tough times, so I called that practice to see if I could get an appointment. Of course they couldn’t see me, which was a huge blow.  Before you get mad on my behalf for the practice turning me down, they only treat menopausal and postpartum women, of which I’m neither, and the receptionist tried really hard to figure out a way I could come and when we finally realized that it wouldn’t work recommended other practices, but still my first cry for help didn’t even work.  

But when I draw a line in the sand, I draw a line in the sand.  So I poled my friends on facebook and all of their recs either didn’t take my insurance or were an inconveniently far drive.  I looked at what my health insurance list said and almost chose a person whose last name was Swerengen, just because I loved the show Deadwood.  But I couldn’t make the call.

Realizing my resolve was wavering, and I was finding every reason I could to not to call someone, I decided to just call the practice we used for the girls after our car accident left them unhinged.  (hell, it left me unhinged, that’s why I ended up starting anti-anxiety meds, but that’s a story for another day)  I knew they took my insurance, I knew how to get there, and I was doing my best to remove barriers to therapy.  I used the logic that even if it was a terrible fit, and an annoying drive, it existed and I was already in their system and familiar with their intake procedures.

Luckily, they had appointments available, unluckily they were right in the middle of the school run.  I called Josh and told him my disappointment and he said he’d stay home so I could get therapy started.  

I felt an overwhelming sense of pride at getting myself there.  I filled out my intake documents, made sure I had my insurance information, a check for the copay (since the last time I was there they only took checks), I had a mug of coffee and my knitting and I was ready to do it.  Imagine my further joy when Dr. B was such a good fit.  At that point I had forgotten basically all of my skills.  All of my strategies for coping with my anxiety were just covered by a dusty tarp locked up in some summer house no one had visited in years.  Over the course of that session he started pulling off the tarps one by one, throwing open the curtains and reminding me of all of these things that I could do to help myself.  Things that I knew but hadn’t needed in so long that I had forgotten they were there.  He doesn’t like to take any credit, since I do all the work.  But I do credit him for providing me the space to work out my plan for getting better, and for being a solid person to bounce ideas off of, who calls out my guilt and anxiety when it’s managed to fool me into listening to it.

I often visualize my depression and anxiety like waves at the beach.  I can stand there, knee deep in water and watch the waves roll in.  Some are larger than others, but they just keep rolling in.  Some come up to my knees, some to my waist, and others are over my head and knock me down and roll me on the ocean floor before I can regain my footing.  I have no more more power to stop the waves of depression than I can stop the waves on the shore.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t swim.  They don’t have to drag me under.  Therapy is reminding me I can swim, teaching me a few new strokes, maybe finding a path for me to leave the beach.  

This wave metaphor has been a powerful image for me when I feel like I can’t manage.  First, it reminds me of going to the beach with my girls.  We go quite a bit during the summer and it’s usually amazing.  It’s one of the few things we can all agree on consistently and the best way to spend a day when we’ve been arguing and on each other’s nerves.  Also, we get ice cream on the way home, so bonus.  Second, it reminds me that as overwhelming as it feels to be rolled by a wave, it’s also finite.  It ends and I can stand up again.  Sometimes all I need is the patience to wait for it to move past me.  Third, it’s a really powerful sense memory.  I can close my eyes and see the beach we go to during the summer.  I try to time my breaths to the waves as I calm myself down.  It’s such a clear picture that I can pick out tiny fragments to focus on to recenter myself.  The sounds, the smells, the feelings of the sun, or water, or sand, all of these can ground me in a moment when I feel myself spiralling.

The visual helps me deal with whatever I’m struggling with in the moment, but the metaphor also helps me forgive myself for the struggle.  Being angry at myself for having anxiety is like being angry at the ocean for making waves.  Do I feel guilty about “letting” an ocean wave knock me down?  No.  Why should I feel so guilty when a wave of anxiety knocks me down?  I can ride out the wave, and try to make better decisions in the future to make the wave less intense, but this guilt about the waves existing is pointless.     

Being such a powerful image I started having all of these ideas for knit waves, and I wanted to explore how it would look.  I love the idea of the waves decreasing in strength, and I wanted to knit something to bring that metaphor to life.  To remind myself that my recovery isn’t a straight line and that’s okay.  Even though these waves will keep coming they will become more manageable.  My life is full of stressful events -- some good stress, some bad stress, but full of events.  But I will learn to manage them (and I will recover when I don’t manage them).

The New Wave cowl is an exploration of waves made out of wedges of short rows.  You decrease at the end of each wedge so they shrink organically as the project goes on.  You will end up with a long triangular piece of knitted fabric that you could wear as a short scarf, or a cowl.  Wearing it like a cowl makes me feel a bit like if Queen Elizabeth I had a baby who was a steampunk pirate princess, which is kind of awesome and maybe my next cosplay.  Using a tonal, variegated, or striping yarn makes the wedges stand out more.  The wedges are repetitive and pretty easy to master once you make a couple.  If you are intimidated by the concept of the wedge, knit Whatever you Need Me to Do first.  The only difference between those wedges and these is the decrease on the last row so it’s a good way to get used to the stitch in a low commitment project.

Blank Stare

It’s weird living your life in the open online.  I use facebook a lot, and I’m not shy about posting when I feel terrible, or happy, or sick, or proud.  I’ve been open about my recent wave of depression, from the day that really clicked it into hyperdrive, to my search for a therapist because of my panic attacks, to my continued struggles, and successes.  Numbness, happiness, cake recipes, and cat videos, I do all of that on facebook.  I try to be my authentic self online, not just the glossy version of myself.  I struggled against instagram for a long time because everything is so damn pretty.  It turns out the filters make even my sink full of dirty dishes look gorgeous.  But I try to find a way to be me, with my rough edges, and broken spots.  We all have them, and I want --ALWAYS-- for you to connect with the entire me, not some polished aspect of me.  I want us to share our humanity, and often our humanity is messy.

I have had a lot of friends -- old and new, random acquaintances, and now even complete strangers, seek me out, to cheer me on or to tell me they were thinking about me.  A lot of them shared that they appreciate my honesty and openness and talked to me about their own struggles with anxiety and depression.  They’ve shared how knitting has helped them through their own challenges.  They’ve given me advice on treatment options, or just sent me virtual hugs and support. It’s amazing the feeling of connectedness that you can gain from sharing your vulnerabilities.  Because I spend most of my time at home, mostly alone, I have a hard time remembering how to do that in person, but it’s so easy for me to share myself online.  Bonus: I can also type while I’m crying and I don’t need to wear pants.

But my excessive sharing online made harder for me to leave my house when I was at my worst.  I kept on feeling uncomfortably exposed when went out.  I worried everyone would be able to see and tell that I was just a shell of a human and I felt sad and scared to be seen in person in that state.  Josh took a couple of days off of work, because I needed to start therapy right away and the only available appointment conflicted with the school pick-up, and also I wasn’t working so well by myself.  Because of that we were able to go to a school concert together to watch Clara play recorder with the rest of the 4th graders.  I knew that she had signed up for the concert to cheer me up even though she has terrible stage fright and I really wanted to go and show her how much it meant to me. (oh my heart, my beautiful children and husband who love and support me so much.)

Sitting around waiting to be let into the school I felt numb and scared.  I was trying desperately to play the part of the supportive parent when I was barely surviving.  I kept on looking around thinking it was so obvious that I was just hanging in there.  Unable to make my face jovial like usual, I felt my numbness pouring out of my blank stare.  It was distressing that someone could be looking at me in that moment, having read about all of my struggles on facebook, and know that I was barely surviving.  I tried to have faith that all of the people who are reading my updates are generally caring people, and just pushed through that feeling of exposure as best as I could.  The desire to hide was so great that I probably would have stopped and retreated if I hadn’t had so many people reach out to me personally.

From a rational standpoint, I think it’s important that we are honest about what depression looks like, especially when it’s a chronic condition.  People talk about how they handle chronic physical illnesses quite easily, but it’s different with mental illness.  It’s crucial that we normalize having mental illness so we can all get the help we need to live our best lives, and I try to further that cause by sharing my struggles.  I have zero qualms about saying I had an asthma attack online, so why should I not mention my panic attacks?  My friends have come to expect the overshare from me, and they seem to want to know how I am, are they the type of people who only care when I’m awesome?  No, they care all the time.  Of course I want to share with them that I’m struggling, they are part of the support system that keeps me going.

At the elementary school, waiting to go to Clara’s concert, I was knitting that sock for her and an older woman started up a conversation with me about knitting.  I was shocked that I could still talk, and say things about knitting, and recommend a class that my friend taught.  It was the first conversation about something other than how much pain I was in that I had had in a couple of days, and it was amazing.  I didn’t even cry!  It was powerful to feel like I could contribute something, even though I was having a hard time just existing.

It really made me think about how knitting connects me to so many people.  My knitting groups, my customers from the old store, all of the folks on ravelry that share their work, historically all of the makers, everywhere.  It gives me a tremendous sense of connection, and on that wednesday morning it gave me a way to have safe small talk, which was such a relief when I felt so overexposed.

Knitting was something that I could do even when I couldn’t to much -- this is a theme of knitting through trauma that I have heard from countless knitters.  Dealing with an illness, depression, divorce, cancer, whatever life throws at you, knitting can give you a sense of purpose, of productivity, of doing something positive when you can’t do much else.  It’s a very powerful thing, to make something.  It makes me feel really good to knit for people, to write patterns that other people make, to share that part of myself is so deeply fulfilling.  Writing these patterns and essays have been a love letter to what knitting has meant to me, to how my knitting can represent so much more than a sock, or a dishcloth, or a cowl, it can mean love, and care, and hope.

And sometimes knitting is my armor.  I find when I’m feeling most overwhelmed I tend to put on a lot of layers of clothes.  Leggings, skirt, tank top, long sleeve t-shirt, sweater, socks, boots, fingerless gloves, cowl (sometimes two), hat, jacket, mittens, it’s not uncommon for me to have all of that on.  I tend to get cold, and it’s been stupid cold this winter, so I can always blame the weather but that’s not really the truth.  For someone who overexposes themselves online, it’s funny to try to cover myself up so much in person, but it makes me feel safe to be surrounded by my little cocoon.  In my current icon image I’m actually wearing two cowls, one that Zoë gave me for hannukah with my Blank Stare Cowl underneath.  This was my depression uniform for quite a while.

I want to thank you for your continued support and messages and comments on the patterns and anywhere you find me online, or in person -- even though I may receive it awkwardly in real life...  I honestly don’t have the words to tell you how much it means to me.  I hope my sharing helps you feel more connected and less isolated.  When you reach out to me, that’s precisely how I feel and I love you for it.

You can purchase the pattern, Blank Stare, at this link.

*** Notes for my knitters ***

For the Blank stare cowl I was trying to take the things that I liked most about the cowls I had been wearing a lot and improve them.  As a person with asthma, breathing through a scarf is really important in the cold weather.  When I’m taking Ollie for a walk, I often have to hold one hand over my mouth to keep my cowl over my nose and mouth while we walk.  I wanted to have something that was stiff enough to stay up over my face.  I also have a cowl that is asymmetrical and covers the space where my coat comes together in the front.  So having that as a design element was important for me.  It’s so good at keeping out cold drafts!

I also wanted this pattern to be stupid easy, something repetitive, and quick to memorize. This was the first thing I designed after the sock and it barely requires me to be conscious to knit it.   I think it ticks all of those boxes. Progress is slow at the beginning, but it’s still manageable.  Once you reach the half-way point in terms of rows, it just seems to fly off the needles.  I have to also make a serious plug for the yarn I used in the first sample.  Osprey from Quince & Co is squishy and springy and holds up really well to repeated knitting (as I found out knitting the matching hat)  It also smells delightfully of sheep if I wear it long enough over my mouth and nose while I’m outside in the cold air.  I know I can’t be the only one who likes the smell of clean sheep, right?

This project also takes way less than two skeins, I had enough to knit the hat and leftovers besides.  Which makes me love it even more.  Make sure you have at least 200 yards, because any less and you’ll definitely run out.  One of the members of my knitting group ended up doing a striping thing and it’s seriously cool.  So if you have two suitable things in your stash, consider doing some stripes in there to stretch your yardage.

Good knitting,
Kim

Whatever You Need Me To Do

It’s no surprise that depression makes it hard to take care of yourself.  The girls have been enormously motivating for me.  When it’s hard to get out of bed and take care of yourself, having two humans that mostly rely on you for everything helps you get up.  At least it helps me.  I’m sure it’s horridly overwhelming for some, but I have this sacrifice = love thing that makes me do it for them even if I can’t manage to do it for myself.

Just having to get up, get them breakfast, get them to school, and then 6 hours later drag myself out of the house and get them home or to whatever after school stuff is happening.  It needs to happen, so I do it.  It has kept me, on some days, from becoming a shut in.  The simple fact is, without the girls, I probably would have stayed in bed for a decent portion of the past few months.  The days where I woke up and felt truly capable to handle whatever was thrown at me were few and far between.

At the end of my first session with Dr. B, he told me to do three things, 1) do something kind for myself to help counteract all of the guilt I feel 2) journal, write with a pen and paper because it’s different than typing 3) exercise, 20 minutes a day, if possible, it’s better than the escitalopram I’m on, clinically, in helping brain chemistry. 

So I did the kind thing first, I went to Barrington Books (high end local indy bookstore) and bought myself a pretty pretty journal.  I tried not to feel guilty about buying myself something.  Not working, I feel guilty about spending money on myself -- which is not to say I don’t do it, just that I wade through some uncomfortable feelings to do it.  This was for my health.  It’s a kindness to put myself first, if sacrifice = love, I need to sacrifice for myself, right? 

Journaling at first, was really awkward.  I’m used to writing, like this, for an audience.  Blogs, facebook, whatever, I’m used to sharing it with people.  Writing for myself is a little odd.  I’m still getting used to being completely honest in my journal.  Is that weird, that I try to soften my edges?  But it’s been enormously useful.  It’s almost like washing the dishes at night and coming downstairs to a clean kitchen, except in my head.  Dr. B said I should try to do it an hour before I go to sleep, so I generally journal in bed, and then chill and play stupid games on my phone until I’m feeling sleepy.  Josh likes to play video games in bed and it’s a quiet time we enjoy together.  Journaling is so useful that on those nights when I’ve forgotten to write I wake up feeling kind of shitty.  I seem to sleep better and longer, and have fewer anxiety dreams when I journal, so it’s become an essential part of my day.

One of the things that drives me nuts about myself and that I do feel shame about is my inability to maintain a routine.  I have a hard time doing the things, every day, that adults do to maintain their health and wellbeing.  I can do something, mindfully, every day for a year and then just straight up forget to do it for weeks.  And then there are times where I get up and go to the bathroom and look at my toothbrush and I just can’t.  There are weeks.  This most recent wave of depression I had a hard time getting into the shower and once i was there I just stared at my razor.  I couldn’t bring myself to shave my legs and armpits, which I do, normally, all the damn time.  But I couldn’t do it.  I’m not sure why the depression makes me actively neglect myself.  But it does.  It’s not that I don’t see these things, I see them and I choose not to do them.  It’s like a passive aggression towards myself.

Once I started to journal, and I realized how much I benefited from it, and it became -- much like taking my antidepressants daily -- a super non-negotiable, I do it when I can do nothing else task, even if it’s just one sentence! I realized that those other tasks that I want to do but can’t seem to bring myself to do were on the same spectrum.  I had an appointment with my family doctor, my physical, and I didn’t want to be gross, so I showered.  When I changed into the horrid paper outfit they give you I realized I hadn’t shaved my legs in literally 6 weeks and had full on hairy legs. 

I was so surprised, I’m not sure why, but I guess I didn’t realize how long I hadn’t been able to do it.  I get a social pass, because in roller derby, there is a lot of intentional body hair, and it could totally just be a thing I’m doing -- but I knew it wasn’t, and I was shocked by it.  The next day I had my second session with Dr. B and I talked about this goal of just taking care of myself.  Just starting with the bare minimum, teeth, showering, meds, journal.  Not to get too ahead of myself but to feel like I can rely on myself to take care of me.

Honestly, sometimes all I need is just the goal.  Deciding that it was important helped me do it.  Like the neglect, the self-care has a tendency to spiral for me.  I shaved, and made the commitment to dental care and my daily inhaler (which I had been letting slide, another chronic condition to manage)  I know I will stumble, but being able to do this feels like an enormous accomplishment.  Being able to look at a task and say, “If I do this, I will feel good for having done it.” and then to give myself the gift of doing it, is pretty amazing.

When I am spiraling, Josh will often recommend that I do a small task that is easy to accomplish and will make me feel a sense of productivity (and therefore, for me, a sense of self-worth).  For the most part it’s usually little chores around the house that have been lovingly neglected for other things.  I’ll be able to look at it and be proud that I did it, and enjoy it being done.   I was so beyond that, so immediately with this recent wave of depression, that there wasn’t really anything small enough.  But the knitting helped, making those socks for Clara helped so much that I kept knitting.  Socks were like the gateway, and then my mind started to be filled with patterns, and ideas, and words that I wanted to share.

The second thing that I knit after a couple of pairs of socks was this dishcloth.  I had a concept for a scarf or a shawl that I wanted to make based on short row wedges that would form a kind of wave pattern.  I mocked something up in fingering weight to see how it would look and I wasn’t satisfied, but then I thought it would be awesome to do a swatch as a dishcloth.  I had purchased a few skeins of dishcloth cotton on a recent trip to Joann’s after Christmas.  I love dishcloths and it seemed like the perfect thing to knit in my depression.  I knit a lot of dishcloths a couple of years ago when I was recovering from a concussion and they were great, mostly mindless, projects.  And I use them all the time in my somewhat sporadic cleaning of my house.

When I was cleaning up my sewing room after the holidays (a project that would make me feel happy having finished it) I found a skein of cotton yarn I sent down to my grandmother, Mee-Maw to knit a dishcloth when she moved to the nursing home.  I think it was the first nursing home, but it was a blurry time in my life.  She was bored and agitated and I was still running the store and I mailed it and a pattern and some needles to her like a love package.  She never knit it, I wasn’t surprised, her health was so poor and it was a stretch, but seeing that ball of yarn in my sewing room made me think about her, about depression and death, about the things we accept as reasons for depression and my imposter syndrome about my depression. 

My life is literally as I would have made it.  I’m truly happy, but I’m also depressed.  How is it possible that I could be this broken?  Also this contradictory?  Can I be happy and depressed at the same time?  Is that allowed?  The depression/anxiety voice tells me I don’t deserve to be depressed.  That I don’t deserve the support and care from my friends and family because I have no legitimate reason to be depressed.  For people without anxiety, challenges happen, they move on.  People without anxiety are this level depressed when someone dies, not when you have an argument with a friend, or miss an appointment.  But I do have this, and as much as I may resent it, as much as I may struggle against the darkness with my own cheerfulness, it will come bite me in the ass if I don’t do the work. 

I realize now that I had become complacent in my mental health, relying only on the joys of the day to manage the darkness without actively trying to manage it myself.  Much like when you have a physical chronic illness when you don’t manage it, the symptoms return, when I don’t actively manage my anxiety, it manifests itself more fully in my life.  Those symptoms of my anxious mind prevent me from enjoying this life that I have crafted, it holds me back from being my best self, and fundamentally I don't want to live like that.  I want to live fully engaged in this life that I love.

The other day, when I was taking glam pictures of this little dishcloth, I had a kitchen full of dirty dishes from a good 5 days of neglect, and as I cleaned up I felt my control growing.  I had my knitting group coming over to knit socks and I wanted the house to look OK, so I cleaned vigorously most of the day, and enjoyed it when they came over.  The next morning the kitchen was kind of trashed again, because I had enjoyed it!  I had made treats, and dinner, and blew off cleaning up the night before.  But when I looked at the sink I believed I could do it.  I knew if I cleaned up I would feel better for having done it.  So instead of actively ignoring it, I dug in, got the dishwasher going and did the rest by hand.  I felt a sense of accomplishment and pride that day that I took care of myself and I took care of my family, and it felt good. 

This dishcloth is a love letter to those small things that I can do to manage.  The small tasks, that when taken individually don’t feel big, but the doing them makes me feel like I’m in control. I don’t trust it yet, those glimmers of control, those feelings of joy and peace, but I am trying to enjoy them in the moment as much as I can. 

You can download the pattern for Whatever You Need Me To Do at this link.


***I highly recommend knitting a dishcloth if you never have.  They are a fun way to test new stitch patterns, the yarn is cheapo at a big box store (or leftover machine washable yarns from your stash), they are good for the environment, and they are darn good at washing anything that needs washing.  You can turn almost any stitch pattern swatch into a dishcloth if you adjust the scale -- who cares if it rolls, or curls, or looks weird without a border, you’re just going to clean up baked on foods off pans, or whatever the hell is stuck to my dining room table right now.    But if it looks intimidatingly fancy, knit a different one.  There are loads of good patterns on ravelry, like this one, this one, or this one.

I hope you know I love you

I hate how my depression and anxiety effect how I parent.  I’d always wanted to be this earth goddess love mother and my anxiety has gotten in the way of that.  I yell more than I would like.  I am often quick to anger and irrational.  I get frustrated so easily when things don’t go well.  And my anxiety gives me all of these neurotic quirks.  The most annoying is my misophonia (the sound of chewing or rustling plastic makes me panic, sometimes even the sounds of my own mouth make me nauseated.)  On the best days I’m pretty fun and I feel free from those challenges.  Accidents and arguments just roll off my back.  But depression makes it so hard to just keep everyone alive, let alone to make each moment a pinterest worthy MEMORY™, that when I’m feeling overwhelmed I also feel like I’m actively making it worse and making my kids suffer.

Kids are a reflection of their parents (good and bad), especially younger ones, and it’s also hard to see how my mood effects them.  My kids have often been my rocks through this recent wave of depression and anxiety.  They have been careful and gentle with me, and give lots of hugs.  But sometimes I need space, physical, emotional, and I try to ask for it in the kindest ways possible, but I know it hurts.  I know it hurts because I see them process it, I see how their behavior changes in response to my own behavior.  They take so much in stride, you know, but it’s exhausting for them, too.  My youngest has so many more tantrums when I’m having bad days.  She tries so hard and then just can’t anymore and explodes.  My oldest is more withdrawn and weepy.   She has always been a clingy child and when I’m having bad days she clings even harder.  Which makes my need for space especially hard for her to bear and for me to ask for.

The worst morning of my most recent wave of depression I woke up with a panic attack.  I had been awake for hours, ruminating on what I was trying to convince myself was just a really bad day -- but was really the day that kicked me over the edge from functional depression to, well, not functional depression.  I felt utterly powerless, devoid of energy, emotional and physical.  I hurt in every possible way, I couldn’t breathe, I was crying, it was one of the most intensely bad feelings I’ve ever had.  I felt like movement was literally impossible.  I recognized in almost an out-of-body observation that it was a panic attack.  That realization made it slightly more manageable.  Sometimes when I’m feeling out of control, the ability to recognize that I’m out of control makes me feel a little more in control.  That rational voice is the one I try to listen to when things get bad.  When the voice says, “This is a panic attack.  You can move, you can do this.” I try to listen.  So with Josh’s encouragement, and tremendous effort I managed to get out of bed, make some lunches and get the girls in the car to drive them to school.  

On the way, I wanted to explain to them how I was feeling because I knew that they knew something was going on, and I wanted them to know it had absolutely nothing to do with them.  It’s amazing how in touch with their feelings they can be.  They are used to big emotions, and so I could tell them that a panic attack is kind of like a tantrum, and it’s like when they feel angry but they don’t know what they’re angry about and they can’t stop it.  Only I’m not angry, I’m scared.  They both were like, “Oh, cool, moving on.”  It was like they got it, kissed me and went to school. 

One of the many manifestations of my anxiety is guilt.  I feel guilty about having anxiety, about how much the people in my life have to work around it.  I feel guilty that I can’t be the person I want to be without so much work.  The guilt has a way of spiralling - like any anxious thinking.  Parenting and guilt are just like best friends, though, aren’t they? You feel guilty for all the things you can’t do, that you can’t fix, that you can’t make happen for them.  The mistakes we make as parents haunt us, or at least they haunt me.  I also have the guilt that I am passing on this stupid disease to them.  When I see my kids displaying behaviors that I recognize it’s so heartbreaking for me.  It can be so exhausting to live like this that the last thing I want is to share it with them.

On my better days I know that I’m mostly modeling good behavior.  When I stumble and fall, I can, and do, pick myself up.  I’m not just ignoring the anxiety, I’m actively seeking help and doing the work.  If there is anything to be said in the positive about this most recent wave is that I’m showing them how to live with mental illness.  I’m showing them that even when life is incredibly overwhelming that there is hope, help, and a way forward.  I can only hope that they internalize some of what I’ve learned and it will make their journey easier.

Even at a young age, I struggled with anxiety.  I didn’t have the words to describe the feelings that I was having at the time, but I recognize now that the strength of some of my memories come from an anxious reaction to events.  Anxious people have a tendency to highlight the things that make us anxious, they stand out in our minds.  We tend to ruminate endlessly on the events of our days, and let me tell you, it’s not generally the highlights, it’s the stuff that didn’t go as we’d planned, the ways that we wished we had spoken or acted differently.  When I started anti-anxiety medication the first thing that disappeared was that endless cyclic thinking.  To say that it was freeing is not strong enough, I finally realized what happiness looked like free from the blanket of anxiety and it was amazing.

That’s not to say that I had an unhappy childhood.  There were specific challenges that I recognize as negative factors looking back as an adult -- we were poor, my parents divorced perhaps later than would have been healthy, we moved when I was 6 to a place that may as well have been the moon it was so different from what I was accustomed.  These things shaped the narratives of my childhood, but I don’t remember being unhappy.  I remember the isolation that I felt when we moved, and how hard my transition was from a suburban southern place to a rural northern place.  I remember those first feelings of not fitting in, the trauma of my adolescence as always being an ‘other’.   As isolated as I felt with the people I went to school with, my family always felt like home -- at least my mom and my brothers, and especially after my father moved out.  I remember us being happy, or crying until we were laughing at what made us sad in the first place.  I remember that love and feeling of safety.  

I have snippets of memories from even earlier where I recognize patterns of thought that I now associate with my anxiety.  I remember feeling terrible for years for that one time my Mee-maw yelled at me.  Or the stress I felt in pre-school when I fell in a puddle and had to wear spare clothes.  I was so embarrassed, mortified as a 3 year old. But no one used terms like anxiety or stress then.  My dad was literally the only person I knew who had EVER been to therapy and he was considered a weirdo.  I was experiencing, struggling really, with something that I just thought was something everyone had, they just handled it better than me, or they were braver than me, or stronger than me.  I can only hope that by having language to describe what they may be feeling will help my girls deal with whatever they experience in life.  That by seeing the benefits of therapy at a young age they will seek out assistance without shame always.  Not just later, but now, any moment when they are feeling overwhelmed is an opportunity to ask for and receive help.  

The first thing I started knitting when this new wave happened was socks.  I think we always go back to our most basic, most secure thing.  Of all the crafts, knitting has been with me the longest, and socks were my first project after the ubiquitous scarf  -- when I was like 10, learning to knit.  I remember the first sock I made was a pattern my mom found that had a seam up the back and I was like, “These are not socks.  You need to call Mee-maw.”  Mee-maw was my grandmother and true to form, she went to the attic and mailed me a sock pattern older than my own mother.  Mom and I went to Shirley’s yarns and crafts, and got some proper sock yarn, and some double pointed needles, and I made myself socks.  They were green and amazing and far more complicated than these socks are.

Socks have been my knitting best friend forever.  Socks are what I make for Josh (since he’s too warm for anything besides socks and hats) Socks are my default, knit without a pattern, sit down and knit while having coffee project.  I can make them in my sleep.  I’ve made dozens of pairs, but I hadn’t knit a pair in years.  Knitting had been tough for me after I closed my yarn shop.  There was just too much pain there.  I’d gotten my creative outlet in other crafts during the past two years.  Don’t get me wrong, I had knit, but mostly patterns written by other people, and sweaters for myself and the girls.  I hadn’t felt particularly creative about knitting, just that I was making things that I wanted to have.

As my mind churned I needed something that didn’t require too much thought.  I have lots of projects on the needles, always, but I’d put most of them aside for the holiday crafting extravaganza that happens in November and December.  I started this sock after Thanksgiving dinner.  They were originally for my youngest, Zoë, but she saw them and told me she hated socks and didn’t want them and since the girls have very similar foot sizes I asked Clara if she would like them and she said yes.  

I was about halfway through the sock when I spiralled out of control, so I picked it up and knit the rest of it very quickly.  I started the second sock in the waiting room at my first appointment with my new therapist.  It provided a good conversation starter, which was nice.  Dr. B knew already the power of projects, and keeping my hands busy, and it was reassuring to me that he was a good fit when he saw it for the coping strategy it was.  

Clara loved the socks so much.  So much.  So much that I grabbed the other skein of that yarn out of my stash and knit her a second pair immediately.  I kept thinking that if nothing else, this sock shows her how much I love her.  How much her comfort and warmth mean to me.  How much I wish I could be there for her every second, every last one, and I know I can’t.  When I’m not there these things on her feet are a representation of that love.  Like a stand-in for my good parenting when I can’t be the parent I want to be.

It’s a lot for a little pair of socks to hold. But they hold it.  They hold us both, in the knitting and in the wearing, they center us both.  These socks were a beginning for me, an unfolding of something inside me, a thread of control, and they led me to this project of words and stitches which has come to mean so much to my recovery.  They gave me something healthy to focus on when so much of my mind was spiralling out of control.  And they’re really warm, and soft, and cozy, and everything I want my love for my girls to be.  

You can purchase the pattern, I Hope You Know I Love You, at this link.