Not Knitting

     Hi lovely people!  I've been vacationing on Instagram, but felt like to coming back to blogging as I miss this space for simply writing.
 
     There has been a struggle within me these last few months with my depression and my creative life.  I've been sailing along quite well for many years with my regime of medication, counseling, exercising, using a SAD light, seeing friends and trying to eat healthy.   Then I was derailed this past February.  It was a subtle shift.  A slow decline that I did not notice was happening until I was no longer interested in knitting.  Not interested at all.  I was not physically knitting, planning new knitting, reading about knitting or listening to knitting podcasts.  It all seemed so pointless to me and when I felt that, I knew something was truly amiss.

     Now, my depression is pretty severe and not of the situational type, but I'm really, really good at pretending everything is fine, even to myself.  My doctor had no answers as to the "why" this was happening to me, but I am of an age of hormonal changes, and she said frankly it just happens.  So, on to dealing with it.  New meds were ordered, then rejected and yet a different medication tried.  It's like being a rat in a lab, doctors truly cannot predict what is going to happen. You need to try the drug out yourself and wait and see.  As your mother always told you - everyone is different.

     Meanwhile, it felt like the end of who I was as I so heavy defined myself as being a knitter.  If I wasn't a knitter than who was I?  Where was my personal identity?  I had no idea.  I started going though all my knitting accoutrements hoping to jog myself out of this rut.  When I got to my stash, it felt wrong to own so much yarn if I wasn't going to knit with it.  Thus began the great selling off of my stash.  Now, stashes vary quite a bit so to give you a sense of the size of mine it was stored in ten Rubbermaid plastic bins. At first it was hard to take in all that I had, list it on sites such as Ravelry and Craigslist, putting a price to my precious stores but, then I started to feel good about what I was doing.  It was like shedding a old skin, an old life.  Currently, my stash consists of only a one gallon sized Ziploc bag of sock yarn scraps and two smaller bins of full skeins.

     Sitting with what yarn I had left I realized how much more comfortable I felt.  There wasn't the crushing weight of years of knitting waiting in the wings.  It was a fresh start.  I kept those last bits of yarn hoping I'd find my way back to the knitting world and my old life.

     Yet, I knew I could not go completely back to my old life of knitting all the time.  The cycle of acquire and consuming at such a fast rate.  Being now unbalanced emotionally I could see how unbalanced I was in my day to day life.  So, I started to remedy this imbalance by watching movies with no knitting in my hands, reading instead of listening to books that kept my hands free to knit, walking in the garden I started so many years ago before knitting entered my life.  I observed there was more to my life than only knitting and there was more to me than just being a knitter.

     I'm making my way out of my hole both emotionally as well as creatively.  I have high hopes for the future, which for me is big thing.  My future with knitting, but also including the other things I enjoyed and sadly forgot about along the way.