The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting

by Alanna Okun

  Because the yarn and needles are so tiny (more like dental floss and toothpicks), you generally have to cast on an improbable number of stitches for an adult-sized sock.

  Seventy-two?! I remember thinking early on in my sock-knitting career. But that’s how many you need for a hat! It’s all in the yarn bulk. You could use thick, cushy yarn to make your sock, but as I’ve experienced, it would turn out to more closely resemble a cast.

  So there you are with your many dozens of eensy-weensy stitches, and, insult to injury, far more needles than you were ever told by popular culture you’d be expected to knit with. Because socks, and most small-circumferenced tubular items, are knitted on lethal-looking double-pointed needles, or DPNs.1 Watching someone knit with four or five needles at once is especially fascinating to people in public places, like the subway; they will tap you on the shoulder or even ask you to remove your headphones in order to ask what you are doing. You will get to feel equal parts smug and annoyed by this interruption, and then you will probably drop a stitch.

  Immediately after the cast-on comes the cuff. Cuffs are the unsung heroes of the fiber world. They’re elastic and forgiving, stretching to accommodate the flippers you never knew your roommate was concealing inside his Converses and shrinking to keep a new baby’s doll-sized ankle warm. Cuffs are a joy to knit, repetitive and quick, and each time I make one I entertain the possibility of going rogue and turning the project into something totally different than I’d planned. Thought you were gonna be a sock? Well, now you’re a sweater sleeve and I am the master of the universe!

  (I have never actually done that.)

  After the cuff is the leg, simple and straightforward. It’s like driving along a flat highway at sundown. And like a highway, it can lull you into a false sense of security—“Look at me, I’m knitting a sock!”—because right after that comes the heel. The heel is what scares people, and with good reason. If you think about feet long enough, which knitting a sock requires you to do, you start to realize what a strange part of the already-strange human body they are, all bones and tapers and right angles. And a knitted object is, at its heart, a tiny feat of engineering designed to contain all that strangeness. It’s a series of problems solved in sequence. A lot of these problems are easy: how do I connect this loop to the one before, after, atop, and below? They can be holistic: how do I cover this body part/household object/dog with a piece of fabric that makes the most sense, that doesn’t add too much bulk, that still allows it to complete its necessary tasks, like pouring tea or breathing? Knitting would be much easier if we all decided to just shove our extremities into unconnected tubes—no more shoulder seaming! Not a bust dart in sight! But we haven’t yet written that addendum into the social contract, and so sometimes the problem in question has another layer, or requires (horror of horrors) math. That is the heel of a sock.

  A heel acts as a hinge of sorts, the spot where you go from knitting vertically (the leg) to horizontally (the foot). You generally accomplish this with a fiddly technique called short-row shaping, which requires you to turn around before the end of a row and backtrack, over and over again, according to some simple but not always intuitive arithmetic. It’s the opposite of, or at least perpendicular to, what you’re supposed to do in knitting—move ever forward, no matter what snag you hit—and it’s daunting enough to repel the most seasoned crafters.

  Oh, but once you get it down, that’s some real master-of-the-universe shit right there. You don’t knit a heel so much as you conquer it, and once you’re finally on the other side the rest of the sock feels like an easy slide to the finish, nothing but gradual decreases until the toe. You seam it up and weave in the excess pieces of yarn. You exhale. Maybe you even try it on. And then you remember: you have to make another. You despair.

  * * *

  When you finish the last row of something, you just straight-up want to be done. It’s the same instinct that often keeps me from sewing up mere inches of fabric or trimming the edges of embroideries, that keeps me leaving loose yarn ends dangling for months, the projects trapped in unwearable limbo. There’s a basket of these almost-but-not-quite objects at the foot of my bed and finishing them all would probably require no more than an hour of work in total. But then, I never want to do the little work, so impatient to reach the end that I jump ahead to the next project without making time to nudge the first over the finish line. (Refer back to “The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater” for further details.)

  There are actually services that will do your finishing work for you, but the next best thing is to do it yourself while drunk. Then it’s like a kindly elf did it for you in the night. It only works at a certain level of intoxication—the same two beers that impel me to do all the dishes and scrub down the bathtub—or else you run the risk of accidentally cutting an important stitch and watching all your work unravel before your tipsy eyes.

  Making a second sock can feel like all the seaming in the world, only worse.

  Isn’t this enough? you want to shout when you hold the completed thing in your hand. Whose idea was it to make us so symmetrical?

  * * *

  While the Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater is about your relationship with someone else—your expectations, your disappointments, your hopes all tangled up together—Second Sock Syndrome is entirely about and within you. It’s not that hard to make two of something. Remember when you had to write valentines for every kid in your kindergarten class? Remember last weekend, when you made two and a half sandwiches and ate them all while standing over your kitchen sink? You do the same things practically every day—wake up, go to work, go home, have a drink, watch your show, fall asleep—so why now this aversion to repetition?

  Two theories, both bearing equal weight:

  1.  What people get wrong about crafting is that it’s not exactly about calm and quiet. Yes, it slows you down, but what I love most about it is how this miniature propulsive force kicks in. I spend so much time launching into some imagined, uncertain future months ahead of myself, or else dwelling days behind on something I said or did (or something I should have said or done). With crafting, you’re still looking ahead, but only as far as your hands; you still look back, but only to see how far you’ve come already.

  Having to make two of something disrupts that nowness. Making more is actually fine—say, forty squares to be sewn together for a blanket—because it changes the atomic unit of the project. Instead of rows, you can track your progress in squares completed. But two is too few units. No matter how firmly you tell your brain not to celebrate, that one sock is only half of the eventual whole, it doesn’t want to listen. And then the disappointment of having to pull out those tiny needles all over again is that much more acute. It feels more like déjà vu than progress—shouldn’t you be past the leg by now, past the cuff, certainly past the heel? What are you learning from doing the same thing over and over again? How will you ever move forward?

  2.  It’s really fucking boring.

  But there are a few solutions. One is to always have a couple of projects going on at the same time, in a couple different weights of yarn: one very bulky to provide instant gratification, like a chunky cowl; one medium and long-term, like a sweater or an afghan; and the socks in question. When you’re bored of one, you can always pick up the other for a while. It’s a little like adjusting the focus on a pair of binoculars.

  It can also help if they are not for you; gift socks, I’ve found, are easier to slog through because there’s an identifiable goal, some amount of gratitude waiting at the other end. No matter how wonderful hand-knit socks you made yourself can be, they’re even better when they’re made by someone you love. Gifts also presumably have some sort of deadline, a holiday or a birthday or a bribe, which keeps the second sock from languishing forever.

  And the best tip I can offer, to knitters and non-knitters alike, is that socks don’t actually have to match. Society just tells you that they should.

  Things I’ve Used Knittin
g Needles for Besides Knitting

    1.  Surreptitiously picking my teeth.

    2.  Very obviously picking my teeth.

    3.  Reaching between the kitchen counter and the oven, where I had dropped a chip. I did not eat the chip after its rescue, which I think entitles me to some sort of adulthood merit badge.

    4.  Scratching my leg when the person I was dating at the time got bedbugs. I knew that scratching would only make the bites worse, but somehow rationalized that if I used a separate implement instead of my own nails, it was okay.

    5.  Putting my hair in a bun.

    6.  Removing the foil from the top of a wine bottle.

    7.  Testing to see if a cake is done.

    8.  Arranging in various receptacles throughout my apartment, sort of as decorations, sort of as totems, never organized such that I can find the right quantity of the right size when I actually need them.

    9.  Fake dueling.

  10.  Fake wand-waving.

  11.  Gripping in my fist while walking home alone once or twice. I don’t know if I could really bring myself to do something drastic, because luckily I’ve never had to. Nothing ever worse than aggressive catcalls and a few guys who’ve followed me for a block or two before losing interest, but even that is enough to make me run-walk to my door and sit slumped on the hall carpet, willing my heart to slow back down. When I was younger I loved this book called The Secret of Platform 13, sort of a cousin of/precursor to the Harry Potter universe. I don’t recall any plot points except that one of the villains kills people by stabbing them through the soft part of their temples with a knitting needle. I think about that almost every time I knit.

  Bad Habits

  I don’t let people look at the pictures on my phone. Lots of folks are like this; the average photo roll is an embarrassing repository of rejected selfie drafts and grainy nudes, mixed in among images of family pets moving too fast to capture and the labels of wine bottles that will never be sought to buy.

  I’ve taken only a handful of naked pictures in my life and I tend to delete my thousands of low-quality multiples in cleaning fits on the subway. But I’ve never erased a certain type of photo that pops up again and again as I scroll past months of images: the top back of my head, neck bent forward, showing a startling and ever-growing patch of white skin beneath my reddish hair. I started taking the pictures in an attempt to stop myself from pulling out the hairs one by one, but after a while they became more of a passive documentation as the bald spot grew ever bigger.

  “I’ll find it,” I say, grabbing back my phone when a friend tries to find a photo of my family’s dog or a coworker asks to approve a group shot. “Just one sec.”

  * * *

  In general I fuss. I’m a nail biter as well as a hair puller, a pore squeezer, and a ruthless tweezer of brow and chin and nipple hairs. Never sitting still, never allowing myself to just be; often I feel like my body isn’t a static, whole thing, but a collection of tiny pieces to be tended and tamed. Finding a split end to peel apart or a hangnail to pull at gives me a grim kind of jolt. It’s a task I can complete, a false but momentarily satisfying way of lurching closer to—what? Perfection? Smoothness? Some time or space where I don’t need to pick anymore, where I can dust off my hands and say, There, good, done?

  Whatever it is, I do it relentlessly: at work, on the train, sitting alone in my house. My brain always wants something to fixate on, and my body is always within reach.

  The nail biting is as old as my memory. I started when I was a child, as soon as I realized that nose picking was not a sustainable public option. Whenever a nail is long enough to start showing that white half-moon sliver at the top, I go for it, like a gardener who can tell when the tomatoes or basil are perfectly in season. Sometimes I bite at nails that are barely there at all, working my teeth underneath the smallest possible edge. I try to maneuver so that I leave a clean, continuous line, but sometimes I miscalculate and rip up too much, leaving the remaining nail split or jagged.

  Sometimes there is blood. Blood isn’t good; it means that I wasn’t methodical enough. Pain of any kind, in any of my countless little pick-pick-pickings, isn’t the goal—I want to fix, after all, not harm—but it does make me alert, like I am alive in the world. If I hurt, I am having an effect. If I leave a mark, I was there. The pain you bring on yourself is comforting, in a way, a means of beating your anxiety or your heartbreak or your restlessness to the punch: at least you’re in control of this small thing. And ultimately, it’s never been painful enough to keep me from going back for more.

  I know this is bad. I know I should quit. Nail biting in particular is such a young, frantic thing to do, especially when you are trying to come across as a semi-responsible almost-adult making her way through the world. From a foot away my nails look short but otherwise respectable—“I keep them like this for knitting purposes!” I’ve lied before, answering a question that nobody’s ever actually asked. It’s only when you examine them up close that you see the unmistakable waviness, the ripped-up cuticles. Every now and then I buy a nail file and some nice polish in an attempt to shield my fingers from my own teeth. But eventually, inevitably, I peel the polish off in strips, and it litters the carpet beneath my desk like sad confetti. I do not get manicures, because I’m embarrassed by the state of my stubs. Not long ago, an old woman hissed, “Disgusting!” to me as I chomped while waiting at a crosswalk. I can’t say I blame her.

  * * *

  The hair pulling is new. Two or three years ago I started noticing these dry, curly little hairs ringing my otherwise straight part, and so I would tug them out, I told myself, in the interest of combatting frizz and letting better ones grow in. They didn’t, of course, but I learned that I liked the hunt. Nails are limited—you either have enough new growth in ten possible spots or you don’t—but there could always be a bad hair lurking somewhere on your head. In fact, they’re more likely to crop up in the spot you just tore from a few days ago (new hairs are usually coarse and spiky, easy to identify by feel among the soft rest of it) and so my right hand learned to gravitate toward that now-well-documented place at the top back of my skull.

  I tried to only pull one hair at a time and I liked to examine it afterward. The darker and drier and more tightly corkscrewed, the better, because it meant that this ugly thing was no longer a part of me. Sometimes I’d look down at the bright-white surface of my desk and my stomach would twist at the sight of a few stray hairs. I preferred to think that once I ripped them out, they would evaporate.

  The first time I quit was about a year in. A coworker took some photos of me for an article he was writing about a new app, including one from behind and slightly above. When it was published, all I could see was the jagged white spot that pooled at the end of my part. Probably nobody else ever noticed, but it repulsed me. I hated seeing that vulnerable patch of skull peeking through my hair, hated that it was public, and so I stopped pulling. I just stopped—family lore claims that I quit sucking my thumb cold-turkey the night before starting kindergarten and never relapsed—and for a few months, that was it. I kept up the biting and the picking but my hands stopped floating up to the top of my head except to occasionally pat the new growth. In a few photos from that time you can see a funny little tuft, too short to lie flat but longer than I’d ever before allowed it to grow. My sudden stoppage was like losing the taste for a certain food: I missed pulling in the same way I now miss Happy Meals—abstractly, nostalgically, with no real desire to actually seek one out.

  But then I did miss it. I’d stopped in the winter and by summer, for seemingly no reason other than the low-grade anxiety that always percolates, I’d started scanning the surface of my head again. I found one irresistibly yankable hair and then another and soon enough there was a patch of raw skin even larger than the one I’d cultivated the first time.

  I learned there was a name for this condition from an arti
cle written by another colleague—“trichotillomania,” which sounds so haunting and Victorian—and that it overwhelmingly affects young women. There are as many as 15 million people in the United States who have it. I could never quite decide if knowing its name and stats made me feel better or worse. Did it mean that I was part of something bigger than me and therefore not alone? That I was legible, and therefore fixable? Or did it mean that I was predictable, just one more nervous girl with an imaginary problem she created but couldn’t put a stop to? In some small, sick way I liked to think that I discovered this, that I was the first to have such a strong instinct to grab and twist and control that I invented a new means of harvesting from my own self. But no, there is nothing new here, just the same mechanical impulse that governs millions of other bodies.

  * * *

  I started snapping my own photos the second time around, hoping I could recapture the repulsion that made me stop before. But maybe it was the initial shock that had done it then, or maybe it was the fact that someone else, however unknowingly, had been the one to take the picture. Whatever it was, I couldn’t seem to get it back. It looked startling, my gallery of bald patches, but it was somehow flattened in the photos, easier to divorce from reality. Did the backs of other people’s heads look like this? I would wonder, making mental notes of part-width and hair distribution. Did other people spend this much time biting and tugging at themselves? If they all did, how would we ever get anything done?

  It does not take years of therapy to notice that these same repetitive impulses crop up in other places. I pick at my heart in the same way as my nail beds. I replay conversations with boys over and over again, trying to pinpoint exactly where I fucked up, said too much, could have been less or more or better. I click through Instagram profiles and Twitter feeds with an obsessive automation that should land me in jail: has the person I’m dating posted something since the last time I texted them, proving that they’re alive and available but just ignoring me? Have they been exchanging too many messages with someone else, or liking their photos in an especially lascivious way? I can’t begin to see into another person in all their chaotic unknowability but I can read text laid out on a screen, and so I refresh and revisit as if I’m looking for understanding when I know all I will ever get are those sharp pricks of pain.