The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting
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6. Tell my left from my right.
How often have I made a perfect, identical pair of mittens, only to realize that they are so identical that the thumbs are both on the same side? Too often, friends. Too often.
Knitting Myself Back Together
When I decided to move into my own apartment after years of living with roommates, my anxiety took over completely.
Idiot, it hissed after I signed a lease on a beautiful little place in an unfamiliar neighborhood. How the fuck do you think you’re ready for this? You can’t afford it, it’s not safe, you’ll regret it, you chose wrong.
* * *
Before I moved, I spent six months trawling apartment-hunting sites with perky, vague names like PadMapper and StreetEasy. It was something like my version of porn, scrolling through these lives I could dart into and out of as I pleased. Who would I be if I had a patio, roof access, a shared bathroom, a dog? How would I arrange my books and my yarn? Where did people even buy couches, and where did you apply for the license to make such an adult decision?
I took careful notes on the average sizes of one-bedrooms and studios (shoeboxian), what I could get for my money (nearly nothing), which types of listings looked like scams (all of them). I filed away this knowledge for some far-off date, when, I expected, I would be ready and able to use it.
It was much too early to be seriously looking, especially in a city like New York where real estate moves quickly, but reading all those listings made me feel like I was doing something. Like I was building up credit that I could trade in for the life I wanted when the time was right. I could have the thrill of finding exactly what I was looking for without the commitment or the inconvenience of actually trying to get it (or, God forbid, of being disappointed by it). I liked how there usually wasn’t any furniture in the listed photos to clutter my fantasies; there weren’t noisy upstairs neighbors or clanging radiators, no unflushing toilets or unpaid Internet bills.
When I get there, I’d tell myself when I was annoyed with my then roommate’s pile of dishes or frustrated by the people constantly streaming in and out of my then boyfriend’s living room. When I get there.
I figured I’d be able to apply all this careful research at my leisure, that I’d surely be able to find the perfect space of my own—I’d prepared! I’d done my homework! The universe (or New York real-estate gods) practically owed it to me. But when the time kind-of-sort-of came to actually start looking, I saw only a couple of real-life apartments.
The first was located in the already-too-expensive part of Brooklyn where I lived at the time, which turned out to be in my price range only because it did not have an oven or a full-size fridge.
“I don’t cook much,” I reasoned to my mother over the phone. “If anything, this’ll make me shop more thoughtfully!” I filled out an application because it was in a place I knew and because I was scared I wouldn’t find anything else, but when the landlord called to actually interview me, I made up some weak excuse and kept searching.
The second was in another part of the city I knew because it was where Sam lived. For months I’d felt as though I lived in his apartment as much as or more than I lived in mine. (Three subway stops, five flights of stairs, and two roommates away.) My favorite clothes sat folded in neat piles on his floor, and then, when he bought a dresser, in his drawers. On the day he moved in, I sat beside him in the U-Haul. I helped carry boxes and directed his roommate in the arrangement of the couch. I silently played a game of What if we lived here together one day? But that never quite rose to the surface, was never something I felt safe or solid enough to want or to name. I didn’t fully live anywhere: not in my house, not in his, and so I secretly, childishly hoped that finding a place of my own would solve everything.
That apartment, though, was not it. It was boxy and lightless, set on a loud and barren street, and more than anything, it just wasn’t mine. I ignored the broker’s follow-up texts once it became clear that everything else he wanted to show me was $400 more per month.
I decided to take a break from searching because I was making myself frantic, even with two months minus one week to go before I had to move out of my current place. What had all that work been for if I wasn’t going to find my dream home immediately? Why couldn’t I just get there?
And, of course, that’s when I spotted the Craigslist post. (It was still how I unwound, even if I told myself I wasn’t looking-looking.) I first paused my scrolling because of the unusual doorways, which were tall and open and shaped like Moroccan archways. The photographs were well lit but not staged; the place tidy but clearly lived-in. The kitchen was painted mustard yellow, which is my favorite color, and the bedroom was painted light gray, which is my favorite color to pair with mustard. It looked small but truly cozy, not “cozy” in the way New York brokers throw that word around. It looked like a home.
Even though it was fifty dollars more per month than the outer limits of my budget, and even though it was in a neighborhood I hadn’t even thought to search in, within hours I was scrambling to find my most recent W-2 and my last three pay stubs. I’d shown up to the viewing and that was it—the landlords lived directly below and were some of the kindest people I’d encountered in New York, let alone while dealing with the housing market. They were a couple with a four-year-old daughter. They complimented my sweater (I’d knitted it) and showed me their garden, where everything, they said, was either edible or medicinal and where they cooked pizzas in a large stone oven.
And the apartment itself was even homier than I’d imagined, with sweeping high ceilings and a perfect alcove for my bed. I had no trouble transposing my own furniture in place of the simple but neat belongings of the current tenants, and imagining all the new things I would get to fill out the rest: a couch for the back wall, a set of café chairs for the kitchen. When I left, my new landlords’ daughter gave me a picture she’d colored of a Disney princess. I felt giddy. I’d arrived.
* * *
But almost immediately after I signed the lease, the darkly familiar rumblings started. The dreaminess of floating through all those hypothetical apartment listings turned into a hard, gnarled lump once I actually chose one. My brain turned furiously on me: what had been the point of doing all that research, all that planning, if I was just going to turn around and choose on impulse?
You did this, it said. You were stupid and now you have nobody to blame but yourself.
I still had six weeks to go before the move and I started to wake up every morning with my heart throwing itself against my ribs. Sam told me I had nothing to worry about, that the place seemed great; my new landlords fielded my questions about neighborhood safety and public transit options with such kindness that I felt guilty for Googling things like “lease break nyc before move in??” in the middle of the night.
Really, what all my panicked questioning translated to was this: I hated not knowing the future, not being able to chart the edges of my life and promise myself it would all be okay. I hated that I couldn’t visualize exactly what my days would look like anymore. One morning I stayed home from work because I woke up to a panic attack so strong that I threw up mucus all over my sheets. I put the sheets in the bathtub of the apartment I’d soon be leaving and called my mother, who patiently repeated how great it was all going to be. Then, to stave off another wave of nausea, I began to knit a sweater.
* * *
My knitting predates my anxiety by about a decade. I’d started with doll blankets and washcloths and coasters (which all looked exactly the same) and then eventually moved on to lace cardigans, minidresses, and a lifetime supply of mismatched mittens, fueled by the impulse to make some of my shapeless fears physical.
Those more advanced projects began the summer after I graduated high school. I was unemployed and unanchored for the first time in my life, competing at the height of the economic downturn for part-time jobs at Sephora and Victoria’s Secret against hot girls who had degrees in fashion merchandising. I’d decided to t
ake the summer off from working at my beloved performing arts camp because I’d thought I should try something new, should see what a little more of the world (or at least the Natick Mall) was like before leaving for college in the fall. I wanted to see who I’d be in a new situation, not surrounded by people who’d known me my entire life; it felt like a sort of dry run before I moved three hundred miles away to a place where I would know almost nobody.
But then there was no new situation, nothing except group interviews and my parents’ couch and the looming fear that whatever was coming was going to be much bigger and more jagged than what I was leaving behind. I’d been go-go-going for so long—getting good grades, getting into college, getting out of my small Massachusetts town—that when I suddenly ground to a halt, all of that percolating energy had nowhere to go.
It feels funny and far away now, that objectively tiny slice of time before I left for school. The months I would spend in this exact same state after college—trying to find a job, trying to make a home—would feel frantic but also free, nowhere near the sludgy muck of that post–high school summer. It was the first time, I guess, that I had nothing concrete to hold on to, to point at to prove that I was doing okay. I grew claustrophobic and tense, all of a sudden scared of driving and disproportionately angry (at the world, but mostly at myself) that nobody seemed to be able to see me. That chorus of What’s wrong with you, why can’t you be better? began its ragged beat, and even though I’ve learned to turn the volume down, it’s stayed there ever since.
About a month into that summer, I pulled out my knitting needles. I’d been in a craftless phase after years spent practicing with my grandma, and at that point I’d never really gotten past that first doll-blanket-shaped endeavor. I couldn’t read patterns and that alone felt like it walled me off from all the knowledge and inspiration I knew was floating around, in books and on the Internet, among people much more skilled than I who knew how to speak that secret language. I’d look at the pictures my not-quite-fellow knitters would post online and it was like looking through a thick pane of glass at something I could visualize but not touch. It was just one more way I wasn’t good enough.
The difference was that I could get there. Knitting became my task. I started to pore over books and then YouTube videos, slowly figuring out what it meant to seam a shoulder or turn a heel. There were a lot of false starts: a pair of socks so large they looked more like a pair of casts, a horribly itchy dress with a skirt so heavy it stretched the top to twice its original length. I can’t quite bring myself to throw these projects away, so they live in limbo in the closet of my childhood bedroom, feet away from where they were created. They’re a reminder of how far I’ve come and how far I have left to go.
I knitted my very first sweater, a cropped yellow cardigan that I can’t say I’ve ever worn, in a blurred week of near insomnia. It was a simple pattern—more of a recipe, really—that I’d had to start over three times before finally figuring out the theory. It didn’t matter that the sleeves were too bulky or that the buttonholes didn’t line up; here was something that was 100 percent mine, that seven days prior had been nothing but a pile of raw materials. Nobody had asked me to knit it or had given me permission. I just did it, and that power was enough to propel me into a summer of unbridled productivity. I almost forgot to be nervous when I packed up and left for school in the fall. I had, in some small way, stopped waiting to be chosen.
* * *
Still, despite finding my weapon of choice, my anxiety expanded and mutated. Sometimes it feels like its own separate person. Privately, half-jokingly, I call her Bad Alanna. She gorges herself on mistakes I make at work and feasts on fights with people I love—anything that makes it look like that happiness I’ve harvested, the progress I’ve made, could all of a sudden disappear. Bad Alanna gets furious with my past self, the one who said or did or wanted the thing in question. She feels helpless to control a given situation and that helplessness manifests as mania, as a blind rage against anything in me that she sees as broken or lacking, as a need to do something about it so raw that it trumps all logic.
Bad Alanna is not logical. She’s all emotion, even has emotions about emotions—you haven’t been truly upset until you’re upset with yourself about being upset. And so when my good and kind brain is trying to yell above the din that You will not be fired, he will not leave you, that had nothing to do with you so please slow your heartbeat—I don’t hear it. Or, worse, Bad Alanna hears it and gets even angrier that she can’t, won’t, isn’t able to follow its calm directive. I have spent a lot of time trying to talk to myself and even more time straining to listen.
But making things dims the roar. The rhythm of stitches, the steadiness and solidness of the ever-growing project—those are real, the antidote to the made-up apocalypse that is my anxiety’s favorite place to play. Crafts are under your control, progressing at (almost) exactly the rate and (usually) in exactly the manner you choose. You can’t jump ahead to the finished product any more than you can fast-forward through the difficult parts, the not-knowing-what-will-come-next parts of life.
And so you have to let the process drive. Making things is a lot like yoga or sex, how it shrinks your immediate universe down to this manageable size where all you have to focus on is what’s right in front of you. Unlike sex, though, at the end you get a new pair of socks or a coaster.
I can chart my roughest periods by the pile of finished and then forgotten projects nestled in the back of my old closet. There’s a chunky lace shawl from my first summer in New York, the only project from when I was falling in love with Sam and out on my own for the first time. There’s a pair of leg warmers from a winter break spent worrying about an art history test I’d sort of cheated on (it turned out the rest of the class had too), and the socks for Joe, my high school boyfriend, who I did not know how to firmly say goodbye to. All these pieces are imbued with a trace of energy from the time I spent working on them. They don’t need to be worn. They’ve done their job.
* * *
In preparation for my apartment, I crafted. I finished the panic-attack sweater (another yellow cardigan I’ve never actually worn) and then felted a set of bowls to hold quarters for the nearby Laundromat. I couldn’t find a bath mat I liked, so I knitted one with five strands of cotton yarn held together on the largest needles I owned. I embroidered quotes I liked onto little round samplers and crocheted some lacy cozies for rocks I’d collected from the beach near my parents’ house.1
Holding these projects in my hands, watching them take shape and picturing them in my new space, made the apartment feel less abstract. I could send these tiny mercenaries out into the future and they would report back that everything would be, if not definitely okay, then at least real. And something that was real couldn’t be nearly as big or formless or scary as I worried it would be. Even when I screwed up—shrank one of the bowls too small, spilled red hair dye all over the white bath mat—those were problems that had solutions. Most, it turns out, do.
The moment you know you are a real knitter, for good and for keeps, is when you fix your first mistake. Before that you are a little helpless, seeking out the aid of teachers and Internet walk-throughs to take you back to the place before you made the hole, quadrupled the stitch count, yanked out the needle. That first bad summer I learned how to read my knitting, to know which loop has to be repaired in order to create the next one. To know that a lapse in attention or a jerky movement doesn’t have to mean the end of anything.
So too in my non-knitting life. I am trying to learn how to trace my anxiety back to its original source so I can better understand how to face it—to prove to myself that it can be faced. So often the only thing you can do is give up the idea that you can perfectly visualize a life, and just keep stringing days together one by one; so often a gaping hole in a sleeve just needs a little tug a few stitches back. And sometimes you just have to sit with the hole, to accept that it’s there and it’s uncomfortable and it’s fine.
What will you be? I wonder of a large pile of marled green wool, three balls of unbleached cotton, a tiny skein of silk picked up at a festival near the college that turned out to be just right. The not-knowing isn’t so bad. In fact, it could be the best part.
Things I Am Better at Because of Crafting
1. Counting really fast* (*multiples of 5 only).
For some reason I count all my stitches in batches of five at a time, and now I do so with all other small things: playing cards, laundry quarters, any assortment of foodstuffs meant to be divided among X number of people. This is a skill that would be more impressive if everyone around me were eighteen months old, but in life you take what you are given.
2. Gripping strength.
I have a very firm and dexterous grip owing to years of clutching knitting needles as if I were locked in a permanent fencing match against myself. This makes my handshakes intimidating, or so I’ve been told, and I rarely have problems with jar lids.
3. Guessing other people’s measurements.
Rarely when it comes to their actual bodies, but absolutely when it comes to their hands, heads, and other outcroppings. If we meet for the first time and I stare at you too long, assume that I’m calculating how much yarn would be required to swath you in knitwear.
4. Whining about how expensive commercially manufactured garments are.
“Urban Outfitters is charging how much for this and it’s made of acrylic? Shit is flammable. I could crochet this out of merino wool in, like, two hours for one-third of the cost and it would last long enough to give to your goddamn grandchildren. Wait, Moriah, where are you going? Put that back.”