Hi, I hope you’re well. It’s later on Sunday than I usually record. We are rounding the bend on Sunday evening which is always kind of a downer moment but I thought I‘d sneak in and record this before I then go and do some hasty last minute sewing on the coat project that I’m behind on. And today what I thought I’d talk about is unexpected motivation and self-help work. I think of this podcast as so niche and focused and weird in its orientation. I love to think about knitting and I’ve been working on my own path to recovery and so much of that is linked to me but it does feel idiosyncratic. And I’m so glad to have found a few others who are interested in hearing me talk about this. Thank you for joining me and there are more of you than I thought there would be when I started this podcast and that’s exciting and it made me want to continue I find it helpful to share about making and my thoughts about recovery through knitting, which is one of my passions. I find that it helps me practice some of my skills that I’m learning in my 12 step program, which is Al-Anon. So I’ll begin by saying welcome and thank you. I’m so happy that I’m not alone. I speak here about my own story and I encourage you to leave everything that isn’t useful to you behind. I hope that it’s useful but I’m not speaking as a representative of any 12 step program but I’m just sharing my own strength and hope.
I’ve been having a lot of anxiety and so have my kids. I think there’s something going on with the transition to online school. My daughter is finding it challenging and we’re working together but not always seamlessly. There’s a lot of struggle. It’s hard and I’m freaking out a bit about what it means for my work. And I’ve said before that my qualifier, my ex-husband, we’re separated, is going through a transition and it’s very stressful. My kids have a lot of hope and I have a lot dread and I’m trying to keep this to myself and work my program and keep the focus on me and just sit with the discomfort and fear that I have.
Why I’m sharing this is that it means that right before bed I have some trouble settling down. My daughter does too. So we’re often just reading in bed. I’m really on her schedule more than mine and so I’m just trying to pick up something to read for 10 minutes or so. I’m so tired and I don’t want a complex plot or anything (although I have been reading a lot of mystery novels which I highly recommend) but one of the books I picked up—to get to the point—is a book that one of my neighbors gifted to me. She had a friend who was giving away a lot of knitting books. And one of them I grabbed because I had another book by this author. I grabbed Sweater Design in Plain English by Maggie Righetti. I have Knitting in Plain English; I read it and I really liked it so I grabbed this one. I’m not someone who is really interested in sweater design or being a designer but I am interested in working with yarn that I have and my hope was that it would help me in not spending a dime more than I have to but keep this hobby that I love. One of my stressors is financial. My ex, who is my qualifier—we’re not divorced yet and we’re still connected in some financial ways and we are different in our approach to money and I have a lot of worry that I will be on the hook for some of his bills. Anyway, I have the itch to cast on a new sweater. It’s fall and everyone is working on their Rhinebeck sweaters. I’ve been making a lot of shawls but I find myself longing for sweater projects.
I have two sweater quantities of yarn that I want to work up and I bought them with patterns in mind but I’m on the fence about them and wondering what else I could do with the yarn so I thought maybe this book would help me figure this out.
This is a really long preamble for what I want to talk about!
What I found there was exactly what I needed to hear on one of these anxious nights. It’s the opening chapter and Maggie Righetti is talking about fear and fear of failure and fear of what she calls “knitting a fiasco.” She defines a fiasco in two ways. She says “we have all seen completely disastrous sweaters. We don’t want to make one.” I just love this because of course I have made my fair share of completely disastrous sweaters! I have been knitting for, oh my goodness, over twenty years. I started the holiday season of my first year of grad school, which was 1999 (I’m aging myself). Anyway she nails these disastrous sweaters down. She says “we fear that the project will be a costly mistake and a waste of time, money, and effort.” And that financial fear was exactly where I was at this week thinking about money and wanting to turn to knitting to provide stress relief and seeing that drift into my project and it brought me right back to when I was knitting on a grad student budget. I bought this very expensive Noro silk garden yarn—multi-coloured variegated—and I made this sweater, which my friends described as a cross between a cosby sweater and a medieval jester’s corset. When she said we have all seen a completely disastrous sweater that was my sweater. And a lot of it was about the cost. I had spent so much money on the yarn, probably a week’s worth of life at the time, it was so expensive but I wanted it. And I thought the yarn was so pretty and I made this ridiculous decision one of those you make when you’re on a strict budget. After being so disciplined for so long you just let loose and make a mistake. Oh my that defines that whole period of my life .
Anyway this book spoke to me and I wondered if I was in a similar moment. I highly recommend it just for this first chapter, titled “before you begin overcoming your fear of failure.” I just found what I needed in this book. And it’s so out of step with how we talk about fear of failure in the “making” community online. I just listened to the love to sew podcast about maker affirmations and while I completely appreciated the spirit of the podcast I just found myself unable to relate to the way that confidence and fear were being talked about in this podcast. Maybe I just have more work to do in recovery and I feel like the shame of addiction in’t part of the conversation. A lot of my fear of failure is linked to living with this baffling and destructive disease. So I just din’t see myself and I don’t’ see myself in the Instagram community of making. There’s definitely an alanon community but I don’t see it intersecting with knitting or making online. So I was surprised by how great this chapter was and how relevant it was to what I was feeling. One was the financial part of this, and not just the cost, and I know there’s a lot of discussion about who is left out of our making communities because of the cost of knitting and that’s certainly a piece of this, but also how it creates a fear of failure.
Now Maggie Righetti is completely focused on overcoming a fear of design and her point is that one of the things that we knitters as do, because we have this fear of failure and that we want to avoid the completely disastrous sweaters, is that we stick to patterns and what is known because we think that they’ll ensure success. And her point is that we should trust ourselves more and to design a garment that is made for us. So this isn’t about sweater design for everyone or how to be a pattern designer but more about how to design something that works for you that will fit and be a pleasure to make. She has this advice about making a swatch and letting the yarn tell you what it wants to be. And I love this; it’s about using what you have and making something gorgeous. Transforming something you weren’t sure what to do with into the exact right thing it was destined to become. But she also gets at the psychological motivation hanging out behind the motivation to do these projects. And she says that in some ways a lot of this has to do with what those around us will say: “There’s a second part of the fear of failure beyond the fear that the sweater will be a dud. It’s the fear that the reactions that an imperfectly finished garment will elicit from ourselves and others. No one wants to appear foolish or stupid. We all need approval from the self and others. And if we don’t hear ourselves and or others saying what we are doing is worthwhile we cannot function and how can we get approval if what we make is no good.
She goes on to say that “long before we were six or seven or eight years old we received these messages from those around us. These old tapes were put into our head and we believed them.” And she says that we’ve outgrown them but we keep playing them over and over and that they’re shaping…our knitting. Ah! I just found this so helpful. She concludes this bit—it’s so good I won’t read it all because of copyright and I want you to go find it and read it for yourself—but she says “we cannot abide the thought of failing and the fear of failure keeps us from trying new things, living in the same unhappy, non-creative place, living with the same old problems. .’’ Oh my gosh this feels like program literature to me. Right, like the fear of failure keeps you from trying something new and living with the same problems.
Now, I don’t know if I keep knitting the same old sweaters—maybe I do!—and maybe I need to change the tape and change the pattern that I’m working with but whatever it is I found exactly what I needed in this chapter. So I very much recommend it, especially chapter 1. It’s like 4 pages and I can’t speak highly enough of them. It’s what I’ll be reading this week, especially when I’m feeling anxious in the week ahead, both in terms of my making and in terms of all of the problems that come from living and loving someone who struggles with addiction.
I’ve been working on keeping promises to myself and keeping the focus on my health even as the waters around me are getting choppy. SO that’s been me. I’m going to go and try to finish up the coat that I’ve been making, which has been both a pleasure and a struggle and I’m not sure if it won’t be a complete disaster. The good news is that it’s not an expensive one; I got these materials from Upcycle so I feel like if it doesn’t work out I’ve only invested my time and not my time and money. I’m cautiously optimistic and I really want to get it done.
I’m wishing you safety and joy in the week ahead and I hope you have beautiful materials to work with and that you’re overcoming any fear about designing something with those materials. Thank you again for listening and take care!