Thursday 26 July 2012

I walk through life on the hands of thousands
Helping me forward on a mattress of tender whispers.
I have only two hands
But they take their place among the thousands.

Wednesday 4 July 2012

Philosockiphal

Yes it's been 2 months since my last post, and yes I've been steadily knitting one sock in all that time. That includes completely or partially frogging about a dozen times.  It's amazing how much punishment Opal yarns take - I love them.

I decided to try knitting a toe-up sock for the first time.  The first three attempts were huge.  The next two were tiny.  Then I didn't like the leg length.  Then I couldn't get the frilly edging pattern to work.  Then I decided to do it my way - and at last it worked.  Here's the photo.

It's only the first of the pair to be completed, and I haven't even sewn in the ends yet, so it's only 99.9% finished.  Suddenly this sock symbolises stuff. 

I've been depressed again for a few months now.  Lots of reasons why.  At first I didn't want to believe it - I beat it last year, didn't I, I had Plans and Actions to stop it happening again - but still it came.  I've spent a fair few days in tears for "no" reason (but there's always a reason if I just dig deep enough), and I've sought help again.

This time there is no massive revelation, no eureka moment, just gentle reminders of ideas that have lapsed.  Apparently this is a lapse, not a relapse - or is it the other way around?  Either way, every day there is a fight.  The wrestle with the idea of opening the front door.  The tug of doing nothing versus the cleaning, clearing, clutterbusting.  The comfort in defeat that is solitude.

Sometimes the prefab ideas don't work.  The recipes don't come out right.  The instruction manual doesn't contain the right troubleshooting.  That's when I realise I am finding my own way, and that thought gives me strength.  I'm not always going to knit the perfect sock straight off, I'm going to have to tweak patterns I've read, until I can say with some certainty that so many alterations have been made that I've actually designed my own sock.  Knitting knoweth not plagiarism!

Knitting designs are born of trial and error and imagination and all the patterns that have been created before.  And that's what's happening in my head.  I'm making up a few new rules to tackle a different year's depression based upon the old rules from the old year.  So far there's been lots of unravelling and unwinding and starting all over again.  No matter.  The knit and purl of my depression is pretending - going through the motions, feeling the odd twinge of a glow that tells me this won't be forever.

I'll be unravelling a million knitted objects in my life.  I feel that depression will be a lifelong fight.  Until the socks stand up and start to unravel me, depression won't win.  It won't beat me.