My blanket story

I've tried for what feels like forever to write my story to share here but I've found it too hard. There are too many things I want to share but I can't. There's lots I may not ever share with anyone. My story, like so many others, is messy and complicated and long. Sometimes when I step into my past and think about my experiences, I start spiralling and becoming scared, as it really feels like I am there living it all again. It can be a struggle to remember where I am anymore and I exhaust myself having to fight so hard to bring myself back. Depression makes me feel overwhelmingly sad about what's happened. Anxiety makes me worry about what may come. Post traumatic stress disorder makes it hard for my body to distinguish between the then, now and later.

Because of these things, the safest story that I can share is that of my blanket.

My blanket began the day I said goodbye to the life I had. They called it fleeing. I’m not sure what to call it because I can’t find a word that seems fitting. Whatever it was, it sudden, intense and terrifying. Before I left I was able to quickly gather a few bags of practical things, but as the weeks passed, some not-so-practical-but-really-important bits and pieces were being terribly missed. I organised a trip home to collect stuffed toys, favourite books, cuddle blankets and games to make the difficult time we were living a little easier. I also made this trip so I could say goodbye. I'll never forget the fifteen minutes I had standing in the kitchen by a bowl of shrivelling fruit that had been left on the bench, in the cold, dense air of a place that instantly went from bursting with life to frozen and motionless as it was shut down and locked up. I stood still while it felt like the walls were spinning, as a flurry of little humans holding scribbled lists ‘on an adventure’, ran through our home with police watching on keeping us safe. I was asked “what about you - what things do you need?” and I couldn't answer. What do you need when you're leaving your life and you don't know where you're going, or when, or how? What ‘things’ do you really need in life at all? I already had all that really mattered in the list holding, adventuring humans, and feeling this realisation meant the rest had faded into being ‘just stuff’. I packed little for myself, but on the way through the house I reached for my bag of hooks and yarn.

I wanted a project that was fitting for the time and came across tutorials for a mandala blanket which immediately caught my interest. At first glance it appeared way too difficult and daunting for my self-taught skill level, but I had reached a point where everything ahead seemed far beyond me, way too overwhelming and way too intense. This is perhaps why this blanket has felt so right from the start. I set off on a journey, that after months of work and with mixed-emotions, I finished yesterday.

Mandalas are used in so many ways, and the designer of this pattern has written something to accompany the 18 parts that she divided the project into. In these sections she writes of what is found within the design, including diamonds to represent creation, flowers and shells for the garden, a celebration and victory wreath, an eight sided star for balance, and the sun as it rises and falls. There is so much just in the pattern alone. She also talks of crochet teaching patience and mindfulness (I'm still working on these). I can see all of this in my blanket and while creating it, I have also stitched memories into mine. For me, my mandala is a way of documenting, symbolising and telling the story of the journey I have been on.

I remember starting round one while sitting on a brown recliner in tucked away lounge room where too many women have sat before me and too many will sit ahead. I was in a place that wasn’t our home but I did everything I could do to make it feel like our home, because the idea of being homeless was too much for me. Feeling so alone and so lost, I created the centre flower and then sat back and held it in my hand. I remember looking down at it and feeling a moment of calm and peace.

I remember running from this place when it was no longer safe to stay there, and throwing my flower, hooks and yarn into the car. I sat in a not-so-nice motel room in the middle of a busy somewhere-I-didn’t-know, because there was absolutely nowhere else that was safe to go. The walls once again felt like they were spinning, and I wondered how I could possibly keep it all together. I was sick with fear and stress, and took survival down to a minute-by-minute task. When the nights were quiet and all were settled and sleeping, I took the blanket and felt like the only sense I could make of anything would be in the stitches I worked. It was hard, and slow and so immensely painful. I look back at the pink and blue of these rounds, and can see the wonky, misshapen, muddled up, messy stitches that matched my mood at the time.

I remember then going through a time where I was so frustrated and angry about everything that had happened. I felt ready to explode at how stuck I was and how much our future was resting in the hands of other people. I was full of rage thinking that the life I'd worked so hard to build had come crashing down in front of me and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Everything started to annoy me. All of the ‘just stuff’ had arrived at a new house that we'd been moved to. It came in boxes that had been hastily packed by strangers sent into our home, then shipped off to storage to wait for however long it would need to. I spent days on my own culling the new life of all of the old life stuff, because it didn't feel right to have it anymore. I donated as much as I could cope with giving away and then destroyed most of the rest. I jumped on it, smashed it, tore it, shredded it, broke it, snapped it and threw it. I did anything I could to rid my life of the stuff that I used to care about, but that ceased to matter in an instant. At the time I didn't pick up the blanket because I wanted to destroy it too. I hated it and I hated everything.

It had all caught up with me. I began feeling disconnected from everything and everyone. I started distancing myself from the few people who were left to distance myself from. I stopped trying to make a new life and started trying to just survive this one. I joined the forum at this time, as I started to feel the impact of it all on my mental health. Here I found a new way of connecting with people who seemed to understand. I found inspiration and motivation, and with it came a glimmer of hope. I picked up my blanket and worked on it again.

For a while I was ok, but slowly the gravity of it all came back. Stress started piling up on me. I started feeling pressure from others (beyond here) to do what felt like just get fixed, stop dwelling, move on, stop feeling so broken, get back into it, get over it all. I crashed spectacularly as all I wanted to do was end the pain and hurt. I wanted to escape it all for good. I found myself once again packing my blanket to take away with me, this time to a mental health service. On the first day of admission, I sat on my bed, picked up my hook, and worked on some orange (a colour that consistently tested me)

Taking this break was one of the best things that I've done for a long time. I slept, ate, laughed, cried, snuggled in a bean bag and crocheted. I was discharged during the blue folding stitches that close the blanket, and I started the final part when I returned home. This part was the very fitting ‘setting suns’. They’re my favourite part of this blanket.

My blanket and I have been through a lot and I feel like we’ve both grown, changed and evolved together. It was once just balls of often knotted, twisted and messy yarn. I unravelled them, packed them into tidy organised bundles, then used them to create something new. This is also what I have been trying to do, and plan to continue doing, with my often messy and tangled trauma filled brain.

I have learnt so many new things during this journey. I made popcorn, ruffle, picot and bobble stitches that I haven’t been able to do before. I have praticed patience, determination and concentration. I have had tantrums, tears and a whole lot of “I can’t do this anymores”, as I found much of it so tricky and frustrating. But with every stitch I worked, the difficult became easier, and I found myself in a rhythm. I have seen and felt how much it changes. Everything always changes.

At one point I juggled two strands of yarn, swapping colours with each stitch.

That was a challenge, but I managed it. Just as it has been a challenge to juggle so much recently, and I have also managed to do it. I know through these experiences, that if I can just keep on keeping on I will get through it.

It’s so colourful. Some of the colours were chosen carefully and some I picked at random, during times when the simplest decision seemed too hard to make. Some work well together, and others I want to go back and change, like the one navy blue row that makes me twitch a little.

But when I see the whole blanket, the colour mash works for me because I know that this blanket is my burst of colour through some of the darkest days.

I have made many mistakes along the way. Some I've been able to notice and correct before they became huge. Some I've had to hide. Some I look at and laugh about now. Some of them have been so big I've had to unravel entire rows consisting of hundreds of stitches and start all over again. Part of me wants to go back and rework the mistakes, like the missing part of one of the diamonds, because they annoy me.

But as much as these mistakes make me cringe sometimes, they do fade into the whole and become part of it, and the whole is definitely something I am proud of. I want this to be the way I look back on my life.

It looks and feels different from different angles and perspectives. The colours and textures seem different in different light. I feel different at times when I look at this blanket. There's so much to see in it.

This blanket has been a distraction from the chaos that surrounded me when too much was happening. I’ve used it for something to do during long stretches when I just really needed to actually do something, anything, because it seemed like nothing was happening. I have found myself using it to soothe myself in the movement of the hook, in the feel of the yarn, in resting my tired, and teary face on it, and in the heavy warmth of it lying across my lap.

It has been a comfort, a familiar and a constant during a time filled with more discomfort, unfamiliarity and uncertainty than I've ever experienced before.

Perhaps most importantly, it has been an exercise in trust. When I held my hook and picked up that first stitch, I ignored my “I can't do this” voice that creeps in often, and instead listened to my “I’ve got this” voice. That's the one that I am trying to listen to and trust more often, because it hasn’t failed me yet.

So here it is. Here is the journey that I can now reflect on and know is in the past. It is also a special something that's not ‘just stuff’, that I can look forward to having with me in the future. And it is what I am feeling and appreciating right now. After months of work, measuring 1.85 metres in diameter and with over 56,000 stitches, this is me and my story in a blanket.

Thanks to everyone who has encouraged me and been a source of inspiration and motivation along the way. And to anyone who sat through that epic novel of a post 😛