Rug Maker

A coffee cup by my side I started another journey and dived into creative writing. I guess my body is also in some sort of detoxing mode again like last summer. I had to leave oats, or pure oats away as well so now I am on a lactose-free, gluten-free and oats-free diet. It is time to be free from something else as well.  

If you read this text, you understand that I am writing for my voice here, writing for the schemes to be visible so that I can release them. I am writing myself into the future and I wonder if I have the courage to continue on this path. Therefore the visibility here in my own little home on the Internet. I am not looking for sympathy or compassion with this text. I’ve set the boundaries in previous text. I eat my words if necessary, but I won’t compromise in my truth anymore. There are difficult themes in this text again, but for me very empowering. I also find it to be so that when we are in the middle of something, we take it so seriously. When we are on the other side, then we can laugh at it and release it. There is forgiveness in laughter, understanding that the struggle is just one part of the journey. So there have been some embarrassing dance moves from a middle aged lady in her sweat pants writing this text and there may have been some Usain Bolt style celebration with a crochet hook in the other hand of course ;-). Or maybe the latter ones only in this text to give light to the fact that so many of us do our own little heroic actions in our everyday lives, for ourselves and others. 

Let’s get back to the planet Earth from celebrations though. There is the hashtag #craftastherapy on Instagram. A few years ago I saw that for the first time and it really bugged me for some reason. I knew of course very well that it is what I do as well, but I thought that: “No, I am not going to use that, let us just keep on making and try to be positive”. I clearly attached some judgment into it since it was still difficult for my part. If you read this text, you soon notice that I’ve really had to eat up my thoughts, haven’t I :-). 

So: #craftastherapy. 

I promise you that this text will also end in laughter and twinkle in the eye. I hope this is hopefully healing and empowering for some other people than only me. And hopefully fortified with some laughter we dive into humanity.

I have to admit that I have been battling these last months, the homemaking project has kept my head above the surface, to see with my eye, to get to pamper myself a bit as well. It has been my sun in many of the days when I have kept going through my TO DO -lists. I fell into some hole last Fall and it took some time to find out of there. At the same time I’ve had the feeling that this will be good, really good. Out of those depths I found this story. 

I have tried to wrap the content around a metaphor again, an everyday practice I know so well. Making rugs out of t-shirt yarn. I have been organizing the details, finding understanding and healing with the help of the metaphor which helps to see the proportions right. I love making rugs so the love helps to tackle with difficult themes. Since it is always love that helps you to heal. Metaphors we know well will then start to reveal the patterns, the lines, the proportions and size of the matter. This writing lead into a lot of tiers and some healing for me. 

It occurred to me while watching this piles of entangled t-shirt yarn, that often we have these kind of unsolved piles inside us, the rest material. Perhaps they end up somewhere in the closet, perhaps we never solve them or then embark on the task with patience when the time is right. Perhaps we are sometimes forced to do so, we are solving those piles to save our lives. The unfortunate thing is that if you do nothing, you leave them unsolved. You give them for others to carry. Perhaps you all too often hope that others can solve the piles for you. We can also call these minefields around us where others only get hurt. We can use whatever metaphor feels best for us, piles or minefields. 

I have solved many of these yarn piles and made many rugs of them and understand how we need to really honour anyone who does that. It is a courageous act to look at those piles of different kind of pain: lack of love, shame, grief, unworthiness, fear, insecurity, egoism etc. It forces you to look back in your own past, it forces you to look inside. For many of us it can be a dark and difficult place. That is what I learned and heard: “don’t spend so much time there”. There was a fear towards the darkness. For me the inner world has always been the place for light, the good stuff. It is only a bad thing to spend time there if we forget to try to serve others with our finds. I also think that the only way into freedom is through solving the entangled yarns, making balls of the yarns and then combining them into a rug and making a pattern of my kind. Luckily there are people who can help us, “educated rug makers” and your craft friends etc. Sometimes there can be many yarn ends in a pile, sometimes only two. Sometimes your whole personality can be this kind of a messy big pile inside you and stay like that throughout your whole life unless something calls you into life and into love. I’ve had a messy big pile inside of me since I had no idea who I was. I’ve had to give birth to myself as an adult. I’ve had to go through the powerful emotions of shame and fear these last months, I think these must be the last difficult and hard rugs to crochet. Therefore the home project. And I don’t yet see myself clearly in the mirror, I can only continue.   

And now we deep dive into the depths of the piles. These kind of stories are common in self-help literature, perhaps someone finds there something to think about so I go boldly forward with the difficult issues in my own way.  

Some of us get these life stories like Benjamin Button, where the story goes backwards in some ways. We need to be adults too early, exist for our parent’s emotional needs and not the opposite when we are children. Perhaps we have to become other halves of the relationship and give attention and admiration to our parents they are not getting from their spouses who have disappeared in their own addictions. Perhaps we try to be couples counselors with all the life wisdom of a teenager. Perhaps we are made the ones to blame, the ones you can put your anger into when the adult is not capable of tackling the life situation. Some of us get the role of the sick and fragile person in the family, the incapable one, a scapegoat and these last ones are the most painful. When your human worth is questioned in different ways. It can be direct, it can be more subtle. It can come from a much older sibling as well. When your truth and your feelings are denied as a child, when you are always told how you feel and never asked to and your truth about yourself isn’t accepted even as an adult within the family. These experiences leave you incapable to speak about your emotions, the mirrors missing in your childhood to explain your emotions and instead you are given the other person’s picture of yourself you see in the mirror. They leave you fearing people, they leave you fearing life. They leave you yarn tightly wrapped around your throat and your body. These are piles I have been solving for so long. I don’t think these piles should have been mine, but perhaps there is some reason these are given in my hands. I can only do my best. 

What do you do when your voice has been silenced, when you have been so severely betrayed? And why it is so often throughout the history that it is the women’s voices which have been shamed? Would it have been different for me had I been a boy? I guess it is irrelevant. What you do then is that you start giving birth to yourself, you start making rugs with the wisdom of the child and the muscles of the adult. You spend the time needed solving the yarns, the dark side of the humanity. You make them into balls to see the primary content. Then you can start making a pattern with them in order to see clearly. They need to become visible, the proportions. You start to recognize your emotions. You release your anger and the past through this physical work. You find your boundaries. You make as many rugs as needed since you have to use all the yarn in the piles. You become a rug maker, you become visible and you can start standing tall on your own homemade rug. You still have these entangled yarn piles and new may come on the way as well, there is enough material for the rest of the life as it should be, but they are no longer a big messy pile inside you. 

I carried these piles for all too long believing in the content of the piles, taking on the piles of others more and more. I seem to like yarn. Eventually I had to change the direction, refuse not to take on any more and solve the existing yarn into balls and start making rugs. Therefore, following the life of the Benjamin Button,  nowadays try to be childlike as often as possible, exist for my own needs and the needs of that inner child so that I can even find what my needs are. Then I can do my service part. If you are ever struggling and not finding joy in your life, it may be a good idea to look at the contents and definition of the word “childlike” and it is different for each and one of us. What were the things you naturally enjoyed to do as a child, which things invoked the feelings of curiosity, wonder and joy within you back then. That is one place where you find your way back to a fuller and happier life, your own path. And I find this to be the wonderful life of Benjamin Button even though it doesn’t perhaps quite go the way that we have set norms in the society to be the measures of a good life at different stages, the common rug patterns. Yet we all belong and I wouldn’t want anyone else’s life. And I hope that my life has now started to go forward the right way. There is this commonly known quote in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” I found on Pinterest several years ago. It is one that comforted me back then and still makes me cry.  

There are of course names and terms for phenomenons I have experienced and lived by, unfortunately happening inside all too many homes even at the moment I write this or you read this. Those are not my words though. We surely need to address when someone else has done us wrong and identifying the matter helps to handle it and start healing and forgiving. It can take a long time even to find what the pain inside is, and we don’t have to forgive if we can’t. Yet I find it to be so that if we get stuck with those words and terms, we are still living in the middle of them. Some things may be so difficult though that you just have to live with them. I just hope that we with time find to the gentle road, so that others can heal too, the service part in my little life philosophy I told about in the last post. If we can’t forget or respect the person or persons who have done us severely wrong, I hope we can forgive to and respect our common humanity. The entangled yarns inside each and one of us. 

We often complain our treatment and our childhood wounds, yet life is lived forward. I hope this text doesn’t come off as complaining. I have tried to wrap the story around a metaphor on purpose, seeing things clearer that way. If we manage to see ourselves as rug makers, curtain makers, pattern makers etc. we have come far in my opinion. I just try to think how we can find words that build and don’t destroy. Being a language teacher as well has sometimes made me to play with the thought that what we would start teaching a more empathetic vocabulary, go towards the beautiful, empowering, accepting and encouraging words in each language. Would the words then start changing the world, would it be that simple? New words also emerge in all languages all the time with all the new phenomenon’s needing a description – and old ones are falling away. It is a question of what do we want to introduce in each language, into our world.       

The difficult part these piles leave you with are the voices and beliefs of others about you. No, you don’t hear voices, but those are the voices of others you have internalized. For me it took years to learn to talk to myself kindly in style: “What is it darling that you need now?” We all have the inner babble going on inside and it is not always so loving. Most of us probably have similar experiences as I have in some grade, perhaps a teacher or a parent, has said to us as a child that: “You will never become a musician”. Even one time can become our inner belief and even as adults we may let it restrict us, but in best case find our way back to what we love to do. When you have heard negative comments all the time – these negative beliefs about you – it is different of course. The voices of the other family members I’ve had to kill inside me restricting my voice, and that is where I still am. They still take energy, they have been quite strong these last months when they want to come out and I have to curiously look at them and the emotions behind. I’ll handle them and I go and talk of course and just exhale. I still fear to use my own voice. The girl, the youngest in the family who couldn’t defend herself yet couldn’t throw the yarns back. Later I threw the piles towards my father, scapegoat as well. These piles go around in these kind of families, none of us get out with a clear conscience. I carry my piles. Now I luckily also have the vocabulary and the patience of a rug maker so I can argument the voices down in real life if still necessary and especially inside me where the battle is and those voices still say that my voice doesn’t matter. None of us should ever have to do this, to fight so hard for our voice. It is the kind of fight though which will make you kinder, it will make you gentler. It gives you perspective, but it also makes you stronger when you start getting to the other side. You find your simple pleasures, self-made and self-taught. You earn your balls you have been making patiently for a long time.    

I have promised myself I won’t give up on sorting out these piles and making rugs as long as it takes. I have developed the patience of a Buddha with myself and my own crochet technique and this intuitive way of healing which seems to work for me in order to tackle the task. Is it so that the mental muscle not only protects your boundaries and gives you the arguments to fight for your truth, it also protects the heart when it is opening up, I don’t know. I have read the whole self-help and psychology department in the local library during the last 10 years to find the words and sort out what is for me and what not. I have talked about these things and I will continue, I have learned languages and developed my vocabulary, definitions and thinking to match the task. I’ve especially enjoyed the Squam Art Workshop podcast by Elizabeth Duvivier. The life stories of creative women have nourished me, helped me with the language part and guide myself on the right path. I have a perfect life quote for every freaking situation from the wise people in the past and present moment. I have them in different languages if mine or yours is for some reason missing in the Chinese tea bag. If this isn’t enough, I will write a PhD about metaphors if it is necessary, once I almost already started to write it. I will travel to the other side of the world if I can find some healer organising retreats during a new moon in the middle of the jungle with some mindless unicorns dancing around me while a local healer balances my energy centres and I sit in Zen Pose balancing a pineapple on my head and sip my green tea with ginger, turmeric and 100 other invigorating herbs infused in water from a local spring. I can even sing some not-so-holy texts at the same time if it is that what it takes. I am a recovering perfectionist so I can always go back to my old ways if necessary. I think that the answer is still inside each and one of us, not in the jungle. What you find there is inspiration, you may find people you can walk together with, your tribe. I think though that the word enough is not in the jungle. And the fun is that had I found into it earlier, and started defining that for my own life, I may have saved a lot of time and effort.    

I may clearly have some loose ends. (Yes, we are getting into laughter I hope.) 

First and foremost, as I told in the previous text, I have carried that little girl safe. I’ve had to make choices which are not common, cut my yarns out of the family, and I’ve had to carry piles of guilt and blame from others on top of everything else. I hadn’t much choice in order to start seeing myself in the mirror. If someone hasn’t respect for their piles of yarn and only keep throwing those to you, you haven’t got many choices. You either fight for your life and love or you live someone else’s life and you may feel quite dead inside feeling pain and uncomfortable all the time and you seek and seek. These are the really difficult parts of humanity. I didn’t do these thing the right way, but I did the way I could at the time when my yarns were still much more entangled.  

I respect of course different ways to heal yourself, I know nothing about anyone else’s journey. Who knows when I find myself in the jungle? There is a lot of wisdom in the world available we can tap into. And I guess there is a lot of information and beliefs we shouldn’t tap into. And we people would gladly fix our problems as quickly as possible. Nothing worthwhile comes quickly though. For me these piles play a big part, they call for work, they call for growth, for releasing – but also for happiness, joy, a life that has depth and a life that is my own with my own patterns. I think that the patterns of the outer world, the ones we think we should live by, may cause a lot of unhappiness.  

And what happens if adults don’t care of our own piles of entangled yarns but give them instead to someone else, like me? Perhaps also naturally a sensitive and empathetic person who easily gets entangled into someone else’s yarns and piles. We have a varying level of ability to carry ourselves and our yarn. And as I said, I like yarn. And when I try to give the yarn back not belonging to my mental yarn stash, those are not taken back. Then they force me to start solving the yarns so that I find my way out of the emotionally messy yarns. They waste a lot of my time. That is what I did in the Fall. That is what I have done enough before, but this time I also made it in order to give all the old piles back. It was my year of connection after all, when I decluttered my mental yarn stash and returned the piles to those they belong to. I got my boundaries. Not everyone took their piles back. I did find piles of my own there, throughout the year, and that was my gift. Now I am making that yarn, the one that belongs to me, into balls and am about to start to make some diamonds, a new pattern out of that yarn. Perhaps that rug and pattern will be called enough, healed from the unnecessary insecurity, shame and fear these piles seem to be containing. We’ll see.   

In the process I had to make balls out of other people’s yarn piles left for me since there needs to be an order in my mental yarn stash and I can’t have everyone else’s yarn laying around everywhere. So I have balls here for a few people that are not mine (oh, it was clever to use this metaphor, I only noticed it while writing :-D). I obviously had to peek in in the process, and these kind of balls don’t turn me on. And it is not my task to make any rugs of them. The way I see it is that we carry our responsibility and solve our entangled yarns. Then we know what to apologize and can do that with sincerity and then we can have our balls back. The bigger the pile you have left to someone else, the bigger balls you then can earn if you have respect for sorting out your piles. There is justice in the size of the piles made into balls, there is justice for everyone in the metaphor. There is respect and love has nothing to do with it. It just is. I accept that this is just my way of thinking and living, I understand that I must have left my piles and balls somewhere during the journey as well – or the ones I have got from the family. 

And we won’t always get our justice, perhaps we don’t get our closure or somehow struggle to let go. So we find our own creative ways into it, like through this metaphor and it can be fun. We find our own way into peace of mind and laughter. We find our way from the past into the future without unnecessary burdens, piles of yarn. Perhaps the laughter really plays a big role in forgiveness.  

So here we are at the end of another long text. We found our way through the darkness into the light I hope and into the laughter, into “the beauty of imperfection”, also called the year of “I am enough, I’ve had enough”. 

And with the help of these two texts I have found two new words for my “words to live by” I seem to be building here on the blog. Home and a rug maker. Perhaps there is enough definitions for the whole year, road maps to follow. We’ll see.   

And #craftastherapy.

Pirjo