Pulling Out Stitches, Unraveling Threads

I really enjoy crochet. I think I've said that here before, but it's worth saying again. I particularly like projects that allow you to fall into a rhythm. There's something meditative about it, the motion of the hand that uses the hook to create the stitches, the sensation of the yarn pulling between the fingers of the other hand holding the tension just so, counting the stitches off in your head, watching those stitches line up into rows, then the rows stack up into patterns.

I made this afghan for my mom, in colors that (I hope) match the living room in my parents' house.

My rock bottom - that place I finally hit that brought about my moment of clarity that this has got to stop - came, oddly enough, when I was trying to jump through the necessary hoops to get my insurance to pay for me to have weight loss surgery. I had to get some bloodwork done, and the results made the doctors worry about internal bleeding, and that means probes. Both the -scopies. I already knew an endoscopy was going to be required, but the news of the colonoscopy threw me into a tailspin. (Yikes, that's a horrible, albeit unintentional, pun.) I went into an on-again/off-again (but mostly on-again) binge that spanned a little more than 4 months. I told the various medical professionals involved in this ordeal that I wouldn't be moving forward. Part of it, to be sure, was that I had absolutely no interest in having that test done. But there was also some pocket of sanity left in my mind that realized the surgery wasn't going to solve anything if I didn't get to the bottom of my addiction first.

This one was for my niece, in colors of her choosing.

Sometimes, when you're crocheting, you miss a stitch or you lose your count or there's a flaw in the yarn or something else happens that throws off the pattern. Sometimes you notice right away and can fix it without too much fuss. But other times, you don't notice until you've completed several more rows. When this happens, you have to pull out all the stitches that separate where you are now and where things went wrong.

I really like this pattern, both the process of making it and the finished product.

For me, recovering from this addiction is tricky and complicated because it's inextricably linked with other things, one that has a legitimate urgency to it, the other which screams loudly in my ear. Those are health (urgent) and societal notions of attractiveness and the discrimination that accompanies not falling within them (loud). See, sobriety or abstinence or whatever the right word is for not indulging one's food addiction can be achieved without any weight loss at all. It's not really about what you eat so much as why you eat. But for me, I very much need to lose weight to improve my health - to keep my heart from failing, to be able to walk from my car to my office (if we ever start working there again) without gasping for breath, to stop having days where I can't fit my feet into any pair of shoes I own because they're so swollen. Then there's those beauty standards. Not being considered thin or pretty enough has cost me lots of opportunities that I know of and probably plenty of others that I don't. My usual response to this is "well forget that, I'm not changing to please these jerks!" But then of course I would like someone, even if it's just one person, provided it's the right person, to be attracted to me. I don't prefer to be alone for the rest of my life. So all these things get wound together and knotted up and it's hard to separate them out, even inside my own mind.

This is my next project, for a certain cat of whom I'm particularly fond. (not my own)

I have so many stitches to pull out. There are so many places where the yarn knotted or frayed, but the pattern started to go wrong more than 40 years ago. It's possible to increase a pattern by stitching two stitches into the same one in the row below, or you can decrease it by joining two stitches into one. So maybe I don't have to pull out quite that many stitches. But I'm not there yet. All I can do is keep going, one day - or bit of yarn - at a time.

This is the pattern photo of a blanket I made for myself.