The Unhappy Hooker

I tend to be an anxious person by nature.  I’m sure it’s genetic because everyone in my family is, or was, also an anxious person.  At any sign of danger my whole family jumps ahead to the worst case scenario when other more normal people have barely furrowed a brow.  My ancestors were undoubtedly the first lemurs up the tree.

Tossing a mysterious series of autoimmune symptoms onto my naturally high anxiety has not helped matters any, either. I spent all last year 97% convinced I was dying and this year 37% convinced I am dying and I’ve observed that pondering one’s imminent demise is enough to throw the calmest person into a tizz.  

I am not the calmest person.

Various methods of relaxation have come and gone into my life.  My favorite and most effective was alcohol, but at some point it starts to dawn on ya that you’re no longer using alcohol, it’s using you.  That had to go. Immediately upon giving up alcohol I discovered Twitter and learned in short order that it’s all too easy to replace one thing you’re overly fond of with another thing you’re overly fond of.  So that had to go too. Writing is my favorite thing ever, but it tends to rev me up, not calm me down. And while I enjoy things like television, gaming, music, and books, they’ve never had the kind of kung-fu grip on my brain that could snap me out of an anxious cycle.  If you’ve ever sat and tried to read while thinking about what your MRI results are going to reveal, or in my case wondering how on earth you can convince a recalcitrant doctor convinced you’re a hysteric to order you an MRI to begin with, you know exactly what I mean. It’s too easy for me to keep that unpleasant mental script going while passively reading or watching tv or even whilst fighting pretend zombies with pretend plants.  I need something that requires active mental input from me to chase the scary hobgoblins away.

So lately I’ve been trying crochet.   Yeah, I mean like with yarn and hooks and stuff.  Now, crochet is something I tried a long time ago when I was young and newly married and still operating under the mistaken assumption that I’d grow up to be June Cleaver someday.  But that crochet was nothing like the crochet of today. You had to buy patterns, for starters. And frankly, the patterns were crap. They were too hard (I swear, some of them you needed a Master’s in Engineering and years of advanced algebra to decipher) and took forever to make due to their complexity.   Not only were the patterns themselves expensive, they required a small fortune in yarn to make them. Times have thankfully changed. I can go on the Internet right this minute and choose from thousands of patterns available for free for not only big and complicated projects, but little tiny projects that take very little yarn and can be done in a couple hours.  And most of them are very simple patterns that you don’t have to be a whiz with a hook to put together. There are even tons of videos on You Tube that even show step by step how to do the harder stitches I could never figure out before.

It’s so much funner when you can actually FINISH a project in a reasonable amount of time.  I’m a Gen-Xer, ok, I have the attention span of a gnat, I need more immediate rewards than a blanket no one will ever use that takes me 6 freaking months to complete.  But now they’ve got patterns for cute little things like stuffed animals and hats and hairbands. And scarfs (or is it scarves?). I’ve never worn a scarf in my life before and now I’m a scarf aficionado.  I own like 3000 of them. I’ve made everyone I know practically a scarf. People see me coming and they’re like “no scarves (or is it scarfs) please, give me zucchini instead”.

And the yarn.  Oh, the yarn.  Not only did yarn used to cost more than the price of a new sweater to obtain, it was also very skinny (skinny yarn can be challenging to work with and it takes way longer to make things out of, since it takes many stitches to make up an inch of work) and it was very VERY ugly.  You probably have memories of awful homemade presents given to you by well-meaning great aunts made of some sort of inflammable man-made fiber that was not only horrifically itchy but so stiff that it was just this side of uncooked pasta. The colors were apparently leftover dye from 70’s era leisure-suits – ochre and day-glo green and burnt orange and joker-suit purple and the ubiquitous cat-hair-attracting Amish black.  But the yarns that they’re selling now are just magnificent. Glorious, even. You can buy angora and mohair and merino and alpaca and even yarn made out of bamboo. You can buy variegated and heathered and tweed and marled and hand-dyed and speckled and freckled yarn and yarn that’s dyed to make rainbow stripes as you crochet with it. It comes in earth tones and neutrals and pastels. You can buy big yarn and giant hooks and make a scarf in an hour, or not-quite-as-big-but-still-pretty-big yarn and a slightly smaller hook and make a scarf in two hours. There’s even yarn so big you can’t crochet it with a hook at all and have to use your hands as hooks. And in a triumph of capitalism, most of these new and wondrous yarns are not any more expensive than those bricks of space-age material that once passed for yarn 20 years ago…many times you can actually get yarn even cheaper if you love a deal as much as I do and are willing to shop around.

This is how people end up dead under a mountain of hoarded yarn.  Just sayin.

If you’ve never crocheted this all may sound so boring that my claim “this reduces anxiety by making me not dwell on my fears” but it really does because it’s a lot more mentally engaging than you might think.  A surprising amount of mental energy goes into crocheting. It’s way more than just the pattern or the stitch. The size of the hook, the size and texture of the yarn, the number of times you wrap the yarn around the hook – all of them make a noticeable difference in the outcome.  I can make a stripe or a bobble appear just by changing the spot I stick the hook into or how many stitches I put into one place. And as you crochet you can then ALSO do things like listen to music or watch TV – the things that have never been quite enough to fully distract me from my woes – and it’s working for me.   For now.*

It occurs to me as I write all this, that it’s possible, even probable, that I replaced drinking too much with Twittering too much and then I replaced Twitter with crochet. Psychologists have speculated about fabric arts being a type of addiction.  Maybe that’s just a pitfall of life if you’re the type of person who tends to get carried away with things – you get carried just as far away with the mundane as you do with the extreme..

I sometimes think many of the things we consider addictions are just healthy instincts run amok.  People with “food addictions” overeat because their appetite led to fat stores that would have saved their lives in a famine. “Sex addicts” are almost certainly more likely to pass down their genes to future generations even in a world before Tinder. Hoarders happen because in a more uncertain world, it made sense for people to keep everything that came their way in case they needed it later.  I am anxious because my ancestors were the first lemur up the tree and even though it’s no longer adaptive for me, that anxiety probably kept them alive in a more uncertain world. We do things to distraction because on some level it makes sense for us to do things to distraction. The challenge is finding that balance between pursuing healthy tendencies and carrying good things too far.  At least, as coping mechanisms go, with crochet I come out of it with something to show for it.  

I may still be an anxious worrywart, but my neck has never been warmer.

*But I’m only 37% convinced I’m dying right now.

Photo by starathena