The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater

by Alanna Okun

  Stop hitting yourself, says the cartoon bully who is me. Stop hitting yourself.

  That is the most frustrating part: performing the same exhaustive motion over and over again while knowing full well that nothing will be different. Like watching yourself in a horror movie, screaming helplessly at tiny on-screen you not to open that fucking door. If you are looking for proof that someone doesn’t want you or that you don’t matter, you will find it; most of the time you can even manufacture it yourself. If you are looking for a piece of skin or a hair to rip, one will always turn up. I spend so much time and energy picking at myself that I worry one day there will be nothing left.

  * * *

  My obsessive picking has no antidote but it does have a good twin. Crafting lives in the same part of my brain (maybe right underneath the ever-expanding bald patch). It’s also a version of that desire to control my immediate surroundings—not through destruction, but through creation. The mechanical growling inside me that calls for a hair or a sliver of nail is also sated, temporarily, by a stitch. For a while I kept a knitting or embroidery project by my desk at work, and when my hand would start its journey toward the top of my head, I’d force it toward the craft instead. All it took was a couple of purls, a single letter of a stitched word, and the machine would be diverted.

  But then it would start back up again, and maybe I didn’t have a project or maybe the extra ounce of effort was just too much, and I would pull. It felt like paralysis even though I was in motion. The same way I fall into holes of not writing, not working out, not doing chores, even though I feel so good when I do those things and so bad when I don’t, even when the distance between the doing and the not is the width of a hair.

  Why can’t you stop?

  Pluck.

  Why can’t you stop?

  Nibble.

  Why can’t you start?

  Blank page, dirty laundry, unsent email: these things call out to be done and when I just can’t make myself, they tut and tsk. Pulled hair, sliver of nail, strip of skin torn from the side of a cuticle: they whisper that I’m not good enough, that I’m lazy and weak and will never be able to control anything. They’re probably right about this last one.

  Crafting replicates the motion of productivity without the pressure. Sweaters don’t call out to be knitted even when they’ve been lying in half-finished limbo for months. Or if they do, it’s at least a plaintive, gentle cry. They don’t stew or mutate in their undoneness, becoming scarier the longer they’re put off, like those other tasks. They don’t grow to monstrous heights the second they are left alone for too long, becoming symbols of your inefficiency, signs that you’ve been faking it the whole time. Crafts stay the same, patient, exactly the size that they are until such time as they become larger. Nobody asked for them to be made except me, and I know they’ll get done. I can reach out and touch the thousands of hours of proof in my closet and on my walls. Sometimes it feels like the only thing I am sure of is this.

  But you can’t knit forever. You can bring it on the subway and even into some of the more chill work environments, but at some point the movement has to find its way into your fingers and stay. That’s what I was hoping for when I tried to replace the hair pulling: that crafting’s calm power would linger and save me. That’s what I hope for, even if I don’t name it, every time I pull out an incomplete embroidery sampler or a half-crocheted scarf.

  Make me better, I ask of it.

  Or, no: Take me back to myself.

  One day, maybe, the hairs will not grow back. I’ll reach up to grab one and find nothing but rawness. And isn’t that in some twisted, backward way what I want? To reach a point of smoothness, blankness, with nothing left to complete? Every now and then I look down at one of my projects and find a single hair, caught in the yarn or thread, suddenly a part of the fabric. It mars but also strangely enhances, adds a glint of light, a disruption. I try to pull these hairs out when I find them but often they snap, woven in too tightly to slide out on their own.

  * * *

  Just like my habits are cyclical, so is the stopping. I quit hair pulling again about a year after the first time and, for the most part, haven’t started back up. I went to see my beloved hairdresser, Vanessa, after a month spent pulling so consistently that I was starting to notice the patch when I leaned my head forward, even without the aid of a phone or a mirror. That was never the plan—I liked to have it out of my sight, only visible when mediated, when I chose to see it. I was long overdue for a cut and color but hated the thought of someone spending time so close to my scalp. Still, the appointment was hard to schedule because she was so in demand, so I parted my hair on the opposite side and went.

  Vanessa hugged me hello, asked me how work was going. I sat down in her chair and faced the mirror. She ran her fingers through my limp, dry hair, and just as I was about to explain away the bald patch, she said, “So you’re still pulling, huh?”

  Of course she’d noticed before; I’d been going to her the entire time. But we’d never spoken about it and so I figured it was just one of those pleasant half lies you exchange, like telling the doctor you have half as many drinks and twice as many hours of exercise per week as you actually do.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “It’s gotten pretty bad.”

  “I have a friend who used to do this. You should stop.”

  I was irritated by this—of course I should stop! Didn’t she think I was trying? I wanted so badly to swat her hand out of the way and pull a hair or two, just to have some way to channel my frustration, but instead I let her wash it and dye it and chop it into the short, layered cut that only she could ever make look good on me.

  “Remember about the pulling!” she said as I left.

  Yeah, okay, I thought.

  But I went home, and I didn’t pull. At first it was because Vanessa had blown out my hair so smooth that I couldn’t find a bad one worthy of ripping out. Then it was because I hadn’t done it the day before, or the day before that. I have an app on my phone where I track how often I exercise (rarely) and write (all the time or not at all) and floss (haaaa), and I made a new entry: Didn’t Pull. That one, I’ve kept up. Each night, right before bed, I swipe the task to show that it’s been completed. It keeps track of the days, and before I knew it I’d hit a streak of 100, and then 101, and then 102 and beyond. It turns out that not pulling, when measured like the ever-repeating stitches of a scarf, brings me almost the same satisfaction as pulling, at least for right now. There is still a lifetime of days to go, but for today I am happy with my little scrap.

  An Open Letter to Crochet

  Dear Crochet,

  We both know that knitting is my first love. I don’t need to tell you how it’s been there for me since before I could read: smooth and consistent, steady and loyal. I can usually even do it without looking.

  But sometimes, Crochet, you’re all that I crave. I don’t even remember how you came into my life—the Internet? Some night when I had too much to drink? My grandma, probably?—but since then you’ve added a dimension I just can’t live without. I love how textured and open you are (knitting can be so stiff!) and how appealingly flexible. Knitting requires working all of those stitches at once, and if you drop one, game over. You, on the other hand, don’t ask for much—just a single stitch worked at a time, so I can switch directions at a moment’s notice. I can’t tell you how liberating it feels to know that I can change my mind as I go with you, even if I’m usually too scared and straitlaced to take the plunge.

  You let me express myself. If I want to make a star or a flower or an anatomically correct human heart, it’s you I’ll always turn to. You have the soul of an artist.

  It hasn’t always been easy. You’re temperamental and untrustworthy—what the hell happens to all those stitches at the beginnings of rows? I’m certainly not skipping them! And you go through yarn like a maniac; sometimes I think you take up twice as much as knitting does, for basically the same results. I have to watch you at all times
to make sure I’m not getting tangled up, and even though I’m a strong, confident woman, you’ve managed to gaslight me into thinking I was wrong when I totally wasn’t.

  But through it all, sometimes I just plain want you. You know what I think it is? With knitting, I always have to wait for an aha moment, when the thing I’ve been making finally starts to resemble what it really is. But you, Crochet, never pretend to be something you’re not. And for that, you’ll always have your hooks in me.

  With yarn and yearning,

  Alanna

  Fiberspace

  It feels like a lie by omission to have gone this far without really mentioning the Internet. Because at this point I live online about as much as I live in my apartment, and probably get a lot more done in the former.

  Partly this is because of my job. I worked for a website since before a lot of people knew what that website was, and for a while I used to cover a fair amount of news.1 That necessitated knowing what was going on at all times, which necessitated being on Twitter, which up until that point had just been an app on my phone that I only remembered when I wanted to make fun of my college’s student government meetings to an audience of 120 followers. I used Facebook because I was a human and Instagram mostly so I could post pictures of my crafts and badly lit meals, but getting into Twitter ratcheted my Internet engagement up by roughly 800 percent.

  I loved it, at first. I loved how fast and funny everyone was, and that occasionally I could be fast and funny right back. I liked the instant gratification of getting favs and retweets, and meeting new people who occasionally became real-life friends, and the sense that there was always this current of commentary and action and reaction bubbling underneath the surface of whatever was happening out in the world. I felt like I was in on something, like finally my sense of humor and my obsessiveness had a place to land. I had a second computer monitor on my desk at work and I would keep Twitter open on it all day, burbling and flashing in the corner of my eye.

  Does that sound kind of like a nightmare? Because, yeah, you’re not wrong. I don’t know if Twitter changed or if I did but after a year or two of having my feed constantly scrolling next to whatever I was doing at work or at home or on my phone, I started to get fatigued.

  First, it was because there were a few people whose updates I did not want to see anymore: boys I’d dated who it hadn’t worked out with, other journalists who made mean and totally unconstructive comments about their peers, anyone who seemed to use it only to perform their unilateral success/cynicism/posture that there’s no way a person could assume literally all of the time. I acquainted myself with the Mute button and went along, figuring we can choose who we follow and that plenty of people probably found me irritating as heck too. (After all, pretty much all I tweeted about was yarn, ice-cream trucks, and my newly acquired pet snail.)

  But then the problem started to feel systemic. The cycles started to get shorter, more frantic, and more staccato: a thing happened, people reacted, people reacted to the reactions, people mocked the reactions and the reactions to the reactions, new information emerged and got folded into the reactions and the reactions to the reactions and the mocking thereof, a new thing happened, people tried to compare and combine the two happenings and oh my God it gets so, so incredibly exhausting.

  I watched countless cycles (which is too neat a word for the ragged rush of it all) and participated in many myself, all while I probably would have been better served doing something else. (For example: my job.) And the answer should be obvious: Just … don’t! Look away!

  Whenever I tried to explain it to my non-Internetty friends or my therapist, I could barely articulate why that didn’t feel like an option. The closest analogy I can come up with is that Twitter, at least my corner of it, is sort of like a high school cafeteria. You’ve got your friends and your frenemies, and the people you want to be friends with and the ones you want to make out with and the older kids who don’t know you exist so you just sit quietly and listen. You don’t just opt out of the cafeteria, especially once you’ve already started eating there. You’d worry too much about missing something, or, worse, that people would talk about you if you’re not around.

  But of course you won’t miss anything, because whatever it is will be distilled throughout the water supply in a matter of hours anyway. And doubly, of course, nobody cares about you nearly as much as you do. This is a good thing! But it’s almost impossible to remember when you’ve been living in such a heightened environment, where every little message you compose is an opportunity for a miniature success or an itty-bitty failure. Because the feelings the Internet evokes are real; the things that happen there are real. Checking my phone a hundred times an hour has become less about strengthening connections and much more about satisfying compulsions; less about seeking pleasure and more about avoiding … what? Pain? Boredom? The unending march of my own mortality? I can’t explain it, which is probably why I keep coming back for more.

  * * *

  So it should come as no surprise that my favorite social network isn’t Twitter. It’s not Facebook (too many engagement rings and former high school classmates arguing about making America great again), nor is it Instagram (I can look at the sunset too). It’s a site called Ravelry. It has about 5 million users, and it’s where knitters and crocheters and yarny types of all sorts find their people. It comprises a massive database where you can look up patterns for free or for sale by the designers, and find projects other users have made, and even figure out what to do with a particular skein of yarn. You can join groups and forums (my favorite is dedicated to finding patterns that look like wildly overpriced Anthropologie items) and you can post pictures of your own work.

  “Are you on Ravelry?” is one of the first questions a fiber enthusiast asks another when they meet for the first time. Or best of all: “Oh yeah, I think I know you from Ravelry!”

  That first summer I really committed to knitting, my first stop was a website called Knitty. It’s an online magazine run by a woman named Amy Singer, and every season they post a new batch of weird, wonderful, and, most important, free patterns from a wide variety of designers. It was one of the first results whenever I blindly Googled things like “cute free knitting pattern sweater easy???” I remember the names of some of those designers as if they were celebrities: Beautia Dew, Jane Richmond, Lee Meredith. And I remember how each pattern is organized on a scale from “mellow” (easy) through “tangy,” “piquant,” and “extraspicy.” I turned those names and those words over and over again in my head like rocks through a tumbler, the same way I’d once done with “afghan.”

  The thing about Knitty is that it was (and is) good. It was funny and down-to-earth and featured items I’d actually want to be seen wearing in public. There was no end to free online knitting patterns even when I was first poking around, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but most of them seemed to be hosted on Geocities-looking blogs that could barely support the weight of the images. There were books, of course, but when the urge to make an off-the-shoulder pullover would strike me in the middle of one of those sleepless summer nights, I wanted ideas served up in front of me right away. I wanted millions of ideas! I wanted them organized and searchable, I wanted comments and corrections, I wanted them to pulse and shape-shift and inhabit the same world that I did.

  Enter Ravelry. I’d noticed references to it sprinkled throughout Knitty and finally created an account (probably at three in the morning). It was everything I’d never thought to want, this portal to every conceivable type of pattern. I spent hours just scrolling through images, marveling at what thousands of people had created and dreaming up ways to make my own stuff. I started Frankensteining, combining the sleeves from one sweater, say, with the shaping and pocket details of another (in a yarn suggested for use in something else altogether). I’d always had this prejudice that patterns were restrictive, that all you were doing was copying someone else’s work; stumbling upon this trove, however, showed me that they coul
d be starting points, some scaffolding to build my own projects around. It also helped that I finally learned how to read them.

  And beyond the technical stuff, Ravelry showed me that even surrounded by nobody but my yarn collection in my childhood bedroom, I wasn’t alone. When I’d hit a tricky part on a project, I’d consult the comments. Most of the time, someone else had been there too, and had a suggestion for how to change your tension or bind off a couple of stitches in order to correct it. Or if they didn’t have advice, they were only too happy to commiserate. I liked to lurk in forums and read the stories people posted about knitting for their children and grandchildren, for their congregations and charities and local biker gangs. I’ve always been a tad too lazy to regularly post my own projects, but I’m only too happy to wade through everyone else’s.

  Ravelry made me realize there was an entire Internet just for crafters. Through these channels I found Cast On, my first favorite podcast, run by a knitter named Brenda Dayne, who has probably the most melodic voice ever to broadcast on the airwaves. I delayed looking up her picture for almost a year because I liked to imagine her as this little musical bubble, drifting over the Welsh countryside in between piles of newly spun yarn. Once I’d exhausted the Cast On archives (RIP), I looked for other podcasts, fiber-related and not; I discovered that I crafted best surrounded by sound, not glancing up and down at the TV or in silence. I’d always sort of thought crafting was supposed to be quiet, save for the click of your needles or the murmured conversation of your sewing circle for gnarled spinsters or whatever, and realized it didn’t have to be—that, in fact, it could be accompanied by the sound of other people talking about crafting. This opened up a floodgate of information and stories and even a few half-assed attempts to make a show of my own. I consumed a whole lot, and it made me want to start putting something out in return.