K - is for Knitting and Me, A Love Story

Knitting is my passion - and it helped me come back to being me!

(At this point I know half of my readers have clicked on to other blogs.

Hope they come back for L.)

Knitting and I came together in 1997. There is a back-story. There always is!

At that time I was coming out of a high pressure management job, and I was very unhappy. As part of my recovery from that experience I came recognize that I had created my unhappiness with my own actions.

My litany goes something like this:

• I loved the job (the responsibility, the people, the work, the challenge).
• I did nothing but the job (no hobbies, no fun, no time, no nothing).
• I lost perspective in the job (no boundaries, no limitations - job, job, and more job).
• I lost compassion and understanding in the job (My way or the highway!).
• I changed to someone unrecognizable in that job (b*tch, comes to mind).
• I didn't eat well or sleep well with the job (No time. It was job, job and more job.)
• I burned out in the job (I resigned without another job lined up.)
• I survived the job (Because I quit - sometimes you just have to say "uncle" and move on).

In the months after leaving that position, I had a great big void in my life to deal with. Yes, I was still working. My employer liked me enough to offer me another position. (Go figure! Guess they couldn't hear my self-talk!) The new job was less stress, less prestigue and less money, but it was more structured, more predictable, and more do-able. But there was all this free time now - a huge void - a space to fill. I think I forgot how to be me. I had to figure that out.

As part of "figuring it out", I began to read for pleasure again, exercise again, spend time with family again (yes, even family seem to fall off my radar) ... and explore a new hobby. When I asked my husband about spending money on a class for learning to Knit - his response - "Go for it. It is cheaper than therapy."

It was better than therapy too.

The act of knitting has a bunch of advantages.

• It has a start, a middle and an end. I needed more of that in my life at that time.
• It produced a final product. In the beginning my final products were pretty terrible. :-)
• It had a mediative quality to it. Knitting long stretches of the same stitch results in a lot of time for pondering other things and relax the mind.
• It was a thinking-person's hobby - complicated stitches and adjustments for fit can take a lot of focus and planning.

Now 14 years later, my final projects are much better, my life is much fuller, and my downstairs closet is pretty full too (yarn stash - an addictive thing - come back when I do the letter Y.) I also own almost every knitting tool known to man.

So knitting is a worthy topic for the letter K. The only topic really!! At least for me.