the Village Knittiot

Lately I’ve been struggling a bit, feeling buzzy in my brain, dissatisfied with myself, fighting with old thought patterns. I haven’t been able to find a peaceful mental space in quite a few weeks now and this is wearying. I have been worrying that there is not enough time for me to “make something of myself.” And when I am feeling pressed for time and overwhelmed by the stresses of life, it is very difficult to gain the perspective required to break free from that particular form of chaos. I start saying things like, “I don’t have time for my walk,” and then skip three days in a row. This does little to improve the situation. Though these feelings are not new, the temptation to view them as a sudden and disastrous failure is always strong. I’m nothing if not melodramatic.

Yesterday, I managed to push myself out the door, despite some extreme grumpiness at the prospect, and onto the street for a short jaunt to the post office. Walks are often a good way to clear my head. And while the cobwebs haven’t been completely swept away, it was a good start.

Whenever I find the energy to stop and ask myself how things got so off track, it is fairly easy to identify the signs and build a road map of the derailment. Often times, I can even see what is going on in the midst of the situation, even if it sometimes takes me a little while to figure out how to disentangle myself from the pattern.

There is a Zen saying that I tend to cling to rather tightly, because it is precisely the sort of reminder my little birdy brain needs.

When walking, walk
When sitting, sit

One of the first things I worked on in therapy was learning how to do one thing at a time. This does not come naturally to me. Usually I have a hundred things going at once and keeping track of them all is a constant exercise in paranoia. What will I do if I drop the ball? Who will I let down? What will people think of me? Yeah, I’m not a perfectionist or anything.

This ability to multitask is something I have been praised and rewarded for again and again. I have prided myself on my ability to manage in this way. In work environments I am often tagged as “the reliable one.” The one who can be given any number of tasks and, thanks to a heightened fear of failure, will get it done, even if it kills me. And it is killing me. On top of that, I don’t always get everything done. I have a tendency toward unrealistic expectations and have an inflated sense of what I can accomplish in a given amount of time. This results in a very sad little knittiot who often feels like she has failed at everything (cue swelling violins and sympathetic “awwww”), even if it was only one thing.

Or rather, that is the old pattern. In therapy I worked very hard to instill more realistic expectations in myself. I learned how to focus. I learned that tackling one thing at a time usually resulted in greater productivity. When talking on the phone, I talked on the phone. When composing an e-mail, I composed an e-mail. When writing, I wrote. When editing, I edited. At least, on a good day.

But we all know that old habits die hard. We go away from therapy for a little while and the good habits are often (temporarily) forsaken as you easily fall back into comfortable, long-standing, deeply ingrained behaviors. It doesn’t take long for you to realize things are different. I had a frightening moment on yesterday’s walk in which I thought maybe I would always need therapy in order to keep my life in balance. Which is not to say that gaining additional insight into my life isn’t desirable, it is just that dependency on a therapist is not the goal. The goal is to develop a strong sense of my own resiliency and ability to care for myself. And thanks to therapy, I have an arsenal of skills to do just that. It was simply a matter of recalling those tools and tricks that helped and trying to implement them again.

Lately my knitting has had this same sense of stress and anxiety surrounding it. As have my creative writing pursuits. I flit from project to project, halfheartedly casting on for something and immediately ripping it out. Thinking about a topic for an article and tossing out a few sentences. Stopping. Contemplating something else. Ripping, erasing, deleting, frogging. All the while, there is this constant clock ticking in the back of my head telling me that I don’t have time for this. I need to be knitting for goodness sake. Or writing something “worthwhile.” Jeez, will you just chill out a little.

And I realized something in this. When I am knitting, I knit. That is why I feel so desperate to get a project going. Something engrossing. Something interesting and meditative. Something that will give me a break from all this mental turmoil. I am looking for that sense of peace that is missing when I have too many things going at once. The missing element from that, of course, is that when I am planning, I need to plan. And since I have been viewing that time required to contemplate the next project as stolen knitting time, it is just making everything seem all the more manic and my desperation gets completely blown out of proportion.

So, rather than get all stressed out about what I feel I should be doing, I need to schedule some time to do what I need to be doing. Planning. I don’t know why it is so hard for us to take even 15 minutes to help ourselves get organized…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 9:16 am and is filed under this Knittiot Life, this Random Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.