Friday, October 17, 2008

Another new home

For me knitting is a way of finding order in the world. It helps me maintain control and focus my emotions and energy on something predictable, finite, and productive. If I do everything the way I'm supposed to, I can have the results I desire (or even better).

Each tiny little stitch harnesses my joys, anxieties, trepidations, and scattered thoughts, and when I look back at pieces I've knit, I am transported to the time in my life when I was making them. These loops and bumps record my experience, and they are invested with what I brought to them.

I have a project that I stopped in the middle of a row, and I'm reluctant to even pick it back up again because it was what I was working on last week when I realized my living arrangement (and as a consequence my relationship) wasn't going to work out.

On Monday, my cat and I moved from Connecticut to my parents' house in New Jersey. My boyfriend and I are taking a break after dating for four years and living together the last three. In my heart, I knew this time was coming, and I am sure it is the right thing to do, but it still really hurts.

This weekend will find my mother and I packing all my belongings (most still not unpacked from the last move) into a U-Haul, and it will be done. I have no idea what the future holds (apart from a wedding we're going to the next weekend), and I have so much schoolwork and thesis stuff to catch up on that I don't really have time to process my thoughts and feelings.

This may be overly personal to share on my knitting blog, but I felt like it would be dishonest to show photos of stitches and projects without giving the emotional context behind them. It happens that my commute will get even longer, so we'll have lots of stitches to mull over in the coming weeks and months. And maybe somewhere in there, things will start to make sense again.


3 Comments:

At October 17, 2008 at 11:20 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

oh hugs!! i'm sorry about you and your boyfriend have separated. knitting will certainly help as you get into a zone with it where processing can occur. hugs!

 
At October 19, 2008 at 11:38 AM , Blogger Amanda said...

So sorry to hear about your split, change is never easy. Hopefully this change will open exciting new doors for you.

I say frog the project of bad memories, wash the yarn and make it into something lovely and new. I did just that to something I knitted for my friend while she was pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy and each time I picked up the project I cried and worried. I could not bear to give her babies a handknit with so much hurt and dispair worked into it, so I frogged it and started again.

 
At October 20, 2008 at 8:22 AM , Blogger Julia O'C said...

When I was about your age, I came to the same conclusion about my boyfriend of 6 years (incidentally, also a photographer...hm). It hurt like hell to walk away but it turned out great. It just took a little while to regain my footing.
I'm sorry that you're going through this. It sounds like you have a wonderfully supportive family to lean on, and lots of schoolwork to lose yourself in.
You will get through this and it won't hurt forever. {{{hugs}}}

 

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home