Unraveling

At the end of 2019, I sat down with Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year. It was the first time in a few years that I didn’t use her finding a word for the year course, and the first time I was bound and determined to beat the birthday blues before they even started. At King State, sitting across the table from Daniel and looking back at 2019, I started dreaming of what 2020 would be for me. I came out with a pretty simple list of goals and dreams. I already had Novel + Jot (a project Jenn and I had been kicking around for a few months) tucked away as my BIG CREATIVE ENDEAVOR for the year, and the rest of the list was focused primarily on creating rituals for myself.

My biggest goal: setting a morning and evening routine, with rigid going to bed and waking up times so that I'd have time to myself for reflection, meditation, and inner growth.

Y’all, I started out doing pretty well, with maybe a little more grace than I should have had about that morning alarm. I journaled more than I had in years. I started using my Calm app meditations regularly. If I woke up at some random early hour, I’d take it as a prompt the universe was supporting my goal and go ahead and get up to a quiet morning and try to start the day peacefully.

February was challenging in unexpected ways and I found myself abruptly facing a level of anxiety and insecurity I had not planned for this year. I took the very scary, tentative steps to start looking for another job, all the while being terrified about how this would change my simple goals for 2020. The little routine I’d been building flew suddenly and completely out the window.

March didn’t let up. I found out my dad needed to have open heart surgery and then the whole world came to a screeching halt at the same time overnight. We all found ourselves in this weird liminal space. So, I gave up on the routine. Quarantine was not the time for rigid schedule keeping, I thought, I needed to be patient with myself, save my energy for the long haul, take each day as it came, and not try to plan too far ahead. I was encouraging the people around me to be gentle with themselves. Meanwhile, I was trying to keep my head down, do my work, and not draw too much attention to myself.

A lot was happening behind these words that I’m not ready to talk about, yet. But just before writing this, as I completed my nightly routine for the first time in 9 weeks I realized that this past week I lived the perfect metaphor for my experience so far in 2020. (A digression: sort of like the horse race in Anna Karenina that gives the whole plot away mid-book.)

You see, one of the things I’ve enjoyed embracing in trying to give myself space for pursuits/interests outside of my 9-5, is a love for crafting. Recently, Jenn sent me several large skeins of yarn so that we could work on making chunky knit blankets together. The yarn sat in a box for a couple of weeks and I finally decided to pull it out and start last week (fully expecting I would have to undo stitches at some point, possibly several times). I’m not a great crocheter/knitter. I tend to make trapezoids instead of rectangles. Anyway, I sat out with optimism to make a navy and light blue blanket. I realized early on that I made it WAY TOO BIG and was going to have to order like 11 more skeins of yarn. The next night, I decided to add in the light blue color, and after a couple of hours of knitting, undoing and redoing some sections, and using four skeins, I realized that my blanket was becoming rainbow shaped. I had messed up the number of stitches in each row and made the first row of stitches too tight. Not being sure how to salvage the situation, I unraveled the whole thing.

Unraveled the whole thing. After several hours of work.

Here I am in the summer of 2020 with a personally and professionally unraveled year and a completely unraveled blanket. When I shared in an Instagram story that I’d started the blanket one of my sisters messaged me and said she’d thought about doing it, but was scared. I told her that I’d already had to undo and redo some of my work and expected to do more. My gentle nudge that there was nothing to be scared of, boldly stated before the great unraveling. And now I’m sitting here laughing at my hubris. What is there to do but start over?

I’ve put 5.5 months into this year so far, days I won’t get back. The choices I’ve made aren’t so easy to undo as unraveling a blanket, but there is the opportunity in front of me to make a whole new start. I don’t know what it is about May 17th, 2020, but I feel a level of optimism and change that I haven’t felt since I sat down at King State to plan 2020. Having already lived through the worst-case scenario of that plan going inexplicably wrong, I find myself reinvigorated. So this new plan may not work out? I’ll live. I’ve made it this far. And so have you.