What’s All This About?

The name of this blog comes from my friend knittingkninja. She and L. and I were at “sit and knit” one Monday, discussing blogs. knittingkninja said that she found that she tended to read blogs that focused on one thing. As I started thinking about creating my own blog, I returned to that comment and my brain typically twisted it, “If it were a blog about me, it would be about one thing and lots of things.”

As an aspiring writer I’m always reminding myself to find the opposites in things. Niels Bohr once said, “There are the trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.” Now I’m not saying that I am a subject full of great truths, but I do try to remember to seek the contradictions in everything. It’s the tension created by contradiction that make things interesting.

Who am I? No one you’ve heard of. I’m here to explore some things in a public space. Doing so is a challenge for me and that’s why I’m doing it. I’m private and I have lots of traits I’m not proud of. So here I am. Presenting myself to the world, warts and all. What I am most fascinated by is the “crazy” in all of us. I hope this blog will, in some small way, add to the growing awareness of mental illness on all parts of the continuum. I am not educated in psychology or psychiatry. I do not know many, many things. What I can share are my own experiences.

So what do I live with? Generalized anxiety, agoraphobia, depression, and obsessive compulsive hoarding disorder, all on a fairly mild level. Most of the time I function pretty well, but all these things do interfere with my life and in many ways, have become my life. So I decided to write about them, not clinically, but personally. I’ll also write about things like knitting, and the little boy I am a sort of nanny to, and Gn, my partner. I’ll write about our two dogs, Oscar and Georgia. I’ll write about food and cooking and living in a decrepit old house full of books and yarn and knitting projects. I’ll write about my friends (with their permission).

[This is the first post in this blog, originally published on April 25, 2008. To read the posts in chronological order, scroll to the bottom of the page or click on a month in the archives to the right.]

Perfectionism

Perfectionism is a killer. No matter how well I do, it’s not good enough. The other day, I got an A- on a paper in one of my classes. My friend got an A. I wasn’t happy with my A-. I felt bad that I didn’t get an A or an A+. The thing is, I didn’t put very much work into the paper–I didn’t think some of my arguments all the way through. The writing was good enough, but it wasn’t sublime. Here’s the thing. It was a frickin’ 3-page analytical paper. It wasn’t my novel. It wasn’t my thesis. I got an A-. An A- is good. What’s my story?

I started looking back on my life through a lens of new awareness. How has perfectionism shaped my behavior? I always think I’m not good enough, so I do things like interrupt in order to show that I know. I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just trying to be good enough, smart enough, and knowledgeable enough. This can come off sounding pretentious, too. Or arrogant. I’m also defensive. No one can tell me anything.I hate showing I don’t understand something.

And then there’s this thing I went through, accumulating useless knowledge in order to be good enough. By useless, I don’t mean uninteresting, I only mean it doesn’t make me a better person. Good coffee, good books, good movies–these are all nice and enjoyable things, but knowing about them doesn’t make me a good friend or a compassionate person.

I thought I needed to know about or do interesting things to be a good person and be loved. All a depressed person can think about is whatever it is she thinks is making her unhappy. This makes depressed people hard to be around sometimes. During different periods of my life I’ve been seriously depressed and during those periods sounded like a broken record about what I perceived was making me unhappy. So I thought if I knew all these interesting things, I wouldn’t be boring or self-centered.

And there’s a catch, of course. What I think is good or great isn’t always as revered by someone else, so by loving these things in order to be good enough doesn’t always work. Well, you might say, this just goes to show that you need to love things just because you love them. Yes. Yes, but. How do I know what I really love or like?

The thing I’d missed, the crucial bit of understanding, was that people who are interesting are out there living life to the fullest. They’re not thinking about being interesting, they’re doing. I was trying to replicate life  with all the trimmings. I was dutifully imitating the people who inspired me, which can be a good thing, but I didn’t always feel it myself. I was too busy standing to one side, watching.

These people weren’t necessarily thinking about being loved (though how can you not think about that in one way or another?) and so were loved. They weren’t thinking about being happy and so were happy.

There are a couple of other catches, too. The whole thing is full of pitfalls. For one thing, there’s the fact that perfection is impossible. And let me not forget that there will always be someone smarter than I am or better at whatever it is I’m setting my sights on. So whatever I’m doing needs to be an expression of my true self, not some imitation of life, some imitation of what other people are doing.

When will I be loved? When I am me: relaxed, vulnerable, and unguarded, the hardest things I find to be.

Life in Interesting Times

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”–Anne Lamott

I’ve been working on a post about perfectionism, but with the events of the last few days, that seems irrelevant. It’s something I’ll get back to in calmer times.

In the last 48 hours, I have experienced intense hope, elation, depression, and severe anxiety. Our country elected the first African-American president, by a landslide. And it’s not just that this occasion is momentous because of his race, it’s that a calm and intelligent man was chosen by the people in this country, signalling that it’s time for change.

At the same time, Proposition 8, a proposition to change California’s constitution to say that marriage is only between a man and a woman, passed. My partner and I have been together since 1991 and people are still telling us that our relationship is second class.

And then, yesterday, my partner’s job was eliminated. It’s a huge wake-up call for me. I’ve been living in a bubble of denial about money and where our lives are going. I’ve spent so much energy staring at my navel that the time I spent doing things I cared about was diminishing. Obama’s call to us to work together and take responsibility for the mess our country’s in sang out just when that mess hit me and Gn right where it hurts.

Obama is right: it’s time to work hard and focus on what’s important. For me that means thinking less about what I do or don’t have, emotionally and in terms of stuff, and getting back to cooking, gardening, spending time with my little defiantly normal family, reaching out to friends and relatives, going back to work, continuing my studies, and writing, writing, writing. (I didn’t leave out knitting and reading on purpose; those things are just there automatically, like brushing my teeth).

What are you doing next? I’d love to hear from you.

Here’s a picture of Georgia that I think embodies how we’re feeling right now:

If Pigs Could Fly

Have you seen my hat?

All pig images Copyright 2008, Gillian Hull.

The new images in the masthead and the image above are from my storyboard for If Pigs Could Fly, an animation I’m working on. I thought I’d post this to show y’all what I’ve been working on at school. Hooray for Berkeley City College!!

It turns out I love the city college experience. It’s very practical and the learning is applied. The teachers are committed to teaching us skills so we can go out and get jobs. I also love how diverse the student population is in terms of age, race, sexuality, gender identity, everything. It’s very stimulating.

My Compulsions, Myself

I’ve decided to embrace certain of my compulsions. This decision is based on the idea that compulsions sometimes come from suppressed feelings. I definitely suppress feelings. I suppress everything. It’s all about control. So what happens if, instead of exercising control over certain areas of my life, I allow myself to do things I thought I couldn’t do?

For example, I had this unformed idea that it’s bad to have more than one knitting project going at once. As my dear S. says, “Whose rule is that anyway?” Where did I get that? Why is it bad to work on ten things at once? I have the yarn. I have the patterns. I have the time. I enjoy it. When I’m bored or frustrated or confounded by one project, I don’t have to get stuck, I can move to something else and the solution for the other thing might just present itself.

So I’ve been doing this, and guess what? I’m not buying so much yarn. I often buy yarn, I think, out of misdirected creativity. By telling myself I have to finish one thing before starting another, I’m putting off the creative impulse. I also find that starting projects is naturally self-limiting. Instead of obsessing about a project, I cast on and sometimes find it’s not what I had in mind at all. That frees up my mind and energy for other things.

Speaking of energy, knitting is a way to direct my energy and calm myself. Lots of people find this so. Studies have been done in which it’s found that repetitive activities are calming, like knitting or saying rosary.

Knitting is praying. That’s not such a new idea, but here’s how I apply that idea to my life, since I’m not a religious person inclined to pray. To me praying is a name for what I call “going inside.” Julia Cameron writes about a similar thing in her books about creativity. Going inside means my mind and actions are working together. Some people call this Zen. Some call it the Zone. Some call it talking to God. So, when I knit, my mind works at lots of different levels, similar to when I’m walking, and then I’m able to sit down and write, full of ideas and details, because grace or God or the Devil or whatever you want to call it is in the details.

You know what else has come out of this experiment? I might try to start a new career. Yep. I now believe that it’s okay to do more than one thing. I now believe that I deserve to have a life. I now believe that if I look to do something I’m interested in, I can do it. I don’t have to do a job just to make money. I can have a job and be a writer. I can have a job that involves writing and still strive to be a novelist. I can have a job that’s interesting. I can go back to school. I can gain skills. I don’t have think of my life as moving nearer to a conclusion and step back to accommodate that conclusion. I’m going to step forward to meet my life.

I’ve always been compulsive about rules, following them because I sometimes believe they’re in place for a good reason, but more often because of a sort of paranoia that if I don’t follow them I’ll get caught and get “in trouble”. I don’t believe I can handle the consequences, so I follow the rules. The problem with this is that I’m also sensitive to all the unspoken rules and follow them, too, even when they don’t make any sense.

When I “go inside” the rules and self-criticism and other static aren’t there. There is no fear of what’s right and wrong or acceptable. There are just the details and me taking note. It turns out it’s the truth that’s in the details. To illustrate this, I’ve included an excerpt from my novel-in-progress Wanted Things.

“And Auntie, well Auntie did smell funny, but she mostly just wandered and was sweet. She was always trying to plant fallen leaves and little twigs so they would grow again. Auntie thought all things needed rescuing. It was true, she couldn’t be left alone or she would turn the stove on and idle away to another room or just stand and look out the window at the birds. She often asked about her dog, who had died in the first month she’d come to live with them.

Carrie sometimes walked with her over to St. Joseph’s School where there was a fountain with The Virgin Mary standing in the middle of it, looking for all the world like she’d stepped accidentally into the radius of someone’s sprinkler, but being Saint Mary she had to look serene about it. Her eyes were downcast and Carrie always thought it made her look a little embarrassed.”(copyright Gillian Hull 2008. This may not be copied or reproduced in any form. Thank you.)

The View From Here

Can a butterfly lick its lips? I guess the question really is, does a butterfly have lips? (This begs another question: whenever a question is asked, what’s the real question? )

I’m not going to try to answer the parenthetical question because the view of my navel is getting tiresome, so I think I’ll look up.

Results of the looking-up experiment follow.

I went from looking here:

to looking here:

Then I went outside to sit in the sun with the dogs. A butterfly sighting isn’t a rare thing in my back yard, but I’ve never had one land on me, even for a second, so what happened next was remarkable. I was sitting with my legs crossed and a smallish brown and white butterfly landed on my dangling foot and stayed there for at least 30 seconds. I swear it was licking its lips. I think butterflies don’t really have lips; they have a long proboscis used for drinking nectar and it may be this that I was seeing. But it looked for all the world like it was licking its lips and eying me(and batting really long eyelashes). Maybe my foot smelled nice. The photo below is not one of mine, but came from this site.

Then, I turned inward again, like a pill bug, but I didn’t roll up quite so much. What I saw was a veritable shawlstravaganza in my living room, a great woolly sequence of events I’m calling Comfort Me With Stitches. Some of the projects here are scarves, not shawls, but I figure that shawls, stoles, and scarves are at least in the same genus, if not species.

First, there’s the Truly Tasha’s Shawl designed by Nancy Bush. Thanks to my dear S. for inspiring me on this one. Hers is in a gorgeous blue. I’m knitting mine in Cascade Ecological Wool, Chocolate. When it’s done it’s going to have a pretty lacy edging.

Second, there’s the Step Ribbed Stole by Margaret Klein Wilson (who, incidentally, sells her luscious yarn here ). My version is in Rowan Yorkshire Tweed DK, in green (I don’t know the colorway name; it’s probably something like Cud). This pattern came from the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful book The Knitter’s Book of Yarn, by Clara Parkes. (My intelligent friend, T., bought the book for me for Christmas last year.)

Third, and also from Clara Parkes’ book, is the apt Butterfly Mobius, which I’m knitting in Panda Silk, in color 3005, a yellowy green.

Fourth, there’s the Garter Lace Triangle Shawl from Martha Waterman’s book Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls. (This book is my most used, most loved, most most most….) The shawl’s in Rowanspun 4 ply Tweed and the color is, no joke, Sludge.

Fifth, there’s a shawl I’m making following the steps in Evelyn Clark’s miraculous, clear, lovely, simple book Knitting Lace Triangles. This shawl is in J. Knits Lace-a-licious and the color is Portland. I periodically mistake this yarn for food and try to eat it, since it’s so soft and nourishing. Plus, a single skein is 1200 yards. Smart, smart people made this yarn. I don’t have a picture yet, because so far it’s just a little embryonic triangle. You know embryos: lumpy, very small, and difficult to recognize as specific shapes.

Sixth, there’s a little shawl called the Clementine Shawlette. It’s designed by Michele Rose Orne and is from the spring 2007 issue of Interweave Knits. This is one of those patterns I didn’t pay any attention to until I saw it in person, around knittingkninja’s neck. Her lovely version is in Dream In Color’s Smooshy, I think in Spring Tickle. No, Duncks, not tinkle. Tee hee.

Mine is in Schaeffer Anne, in the color Margo Jones:

Seventh, there’s a Moebius cape I’m doing from Cat Bordhi’s book A Treasury of Magical Knitting. For this one, I’ve combined three of her patterns–the Shifting Colors Moebius, the Rimrock Cape, and the Lost Trail Cape–to make what I want: The yarn is Rio de la Plata Fino Multicolor. The colors in this skein are Nugget Gold, Chinchilla, and Winter Wheat. The other yarn I’m using is Rio de la Plata Fino Solid in Seaweed.

Eighth, there’s the Union Square Shawl/Poncho designed by Melanie Falick. The pattern is in her book Weekend Knitting. I’m making it in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes and the color is Amber Heather. I replaced the Baby Cable stitch pattern with the Broad Spiral Rib from Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns. I don’t have a picture here, either. So far, this one’s just a bunch of cells.

Ninth, there’s a center-started square I’m designing. Woot! I’m using Knit Picks Shadow in Oregon Coast Heather.

Tenth, there’s a scarf from Lynne Barr’s mind-bending and marvelous book Knitting New Scarves, called Twisted. It’s in Rowan Yorkshire Tweed DK, color Lime Leaf. Yum.
Eleventh, there’s another scarf from Lynne Barr’s book called Aria. It’s in Malabrigo Worsted, Magenta Sapphire. mmmmmMalabrigo.

Twelfth, there’s a little scarf I designed in Margaret Stove’s Artisan NZ Laceweight. I can’t remember the name of the color. I’m calling the scarf Sea Foam:

Thirteenth, there’s another little scarf, this one from CEY Make it Modern, called the Little Leaf Scarf. It’s by Pam Allen and it’s in Classic Elite Soft Linen, New Fern. This is another one with no picture; right now I just have an inch of ribbing.

Finally, there’s a project not in the same genus, but definitely in the cozy family, a tea cozy I’m making for Gn. It’s actually a hat pattern by the inimitable Adrian Bizilia (Hello Yarn): We Call Them Pirates. We call it cozy.

And when I’m not working on these projects, I’m reading The Fox in the Attic, by Richard Hughes, or watching Planet Earth or In Plain Sight on hulu.

So that’s the view from here, butterflies and shawls, and butterfly shawls.

What are you knitting?

Avoidance

Here’s what I’ve been doing instead of writing this post:

• Trying to write an essay comparing Walt Whitman to Sei Shonagon.
• Starting knitting projects. In the last two weeks I’ve cast on seven new projects. I already have at least six projects going (I may have missed one in my count.) I also cast on and finished one project(the scarf, not the pig):
• 
• Surfing Ravelry and talking with my peeps in the Malabrigo Swap forum.
• Adding knitting patterns to my Ravelry queue. My queue is now 30 pages long and has about 870 projects in it.
• Surfing Netflix and adding movies to my queue. I have 473 movies in my queue.
• Making a new playlist for my MP3 player.
• Watching Painkiller Jane on streaming video from Netflix.
• Watching The Rockford Files on streaming video from Netflix.
• Watching Kitchen Confidential on hulu
• Watching Friday Night Lights on streaming video from Netflix.
• Thinking about buying yarn and fighting with myself not to.
• Thinking about the dishes that need to be done, the weeds that need to be pulled, the dust that needs to be dusted, the books that need to be put away, the books that need to be read, the dinner that needs to get made and eaten, the dog poop that needs to get picked up, the plants in the pathway that are dying, the plants in the planter that are dead and need to be pulled out and replaced, the dead leaves on the lilies, the spent blossoms on the rose bushes that need to be plucked, the exercise I should be getting, and, and, and, and…
• Obsessing about the cracks in the walls and their implications.
• Playing Spider on my computer.
• Playing Purble Place on my computer. Have you seen this? With the little cakes? It makes me hungry.
• Worrying about Gn’s health. She’s going to die someday.
• Worrying about the neighbors getting mad because the dogs bark sometimes.
• Taking pictures of the dogs sleeping.
• They’re cute when they sleep.

Writing requires feeling. It turns out I’m afraid to feel. Rather than feel, I’ll do a lot of things. Then I get stuck and don’t do anything at all. It’s easier to go buy something. Or worry. Or anything.

Call Me Crazy

Nuts

Nutty

Nuttier than squirrel poo

Loony

Bonkers

Insane

Eccentric

Queer in the head

Touched

Fey

Odd

Not all there

One hammer short of a toolbox

Weird

Psycho

Bats in the belfry

Bats

Batty

Loopy

Whack

Whacked

Schizo

Touched in the head

High strung

Mad

Bound for Bedlam

Nut job

Bananas

Lost my mind

Starkers

Barking

Barking mad

Raving

Raving lunatic

Lunatic

Stark raving mad

ETA (December 15, 2008) Doolally

After I wrote the first post for this blog and put it up, I thought, “What if people think I’m crazy?” I set out to write a blog about my own experiences with mental illness and I immediately felt shame. What I find interesting about this thought is that it shows me how much I judge myself and others for being “crazy.” I started thinking about it and it’s the label I turn to the most when I’m denigrating someone else or myself. What it really means is I don’t understand the person I’ve just called crazy. It means that person is unpredictable and scares me. It means I scare myself.

Listkeeping

One of the ways I deal with hoarding is to keep lists. It’s virtual hoarding. Here are some numbers(these numbers are always changing, of course):

I have three Amazon wishlists:

1. books, etc.=177 items

2. movies=24 items

3. music=88 items

Our household has two Netflix queues:

Mine=430 movies

Shared=229 (mostly added by me)

My Ravelry queue has 731 items. (Ravelry is an online community and database for knitters and crocheters. Your Ravelry queue is a list of patterns you would like to knit or crochet).

I get various responses when people see the length of my lists. A few are relieved that there is someone who has longer queues than they do. Some are overwhelmed, especially by the Ravelry queue, and say, “You’re not actually going to knit all those things are you?” Many people ask me if I have a job or life (especially when they see the Netflix queues).

It didn’t occur to me until recently that compulsive list-making is a form of hoarding. I’ve decided I would rather have lots of long lists of things I want to read/see/buy/do/watch than hoarding actual things and not being able to live and move comfortably in my house. Hoarding things and animals can be very serious. It can, in the case of animal hoarding, pose serious health risks to the people and animals involved. In all cases, especially when a hoarder’s home is very full and very messy, it can create shame, which leads to isolation. For more information about this see: http://understanding_ocd.tripod.com/index_hoarding.html.

or see the Mayo Clinic site at right for a more formal discussion.

Some hoard because they don’t want to forget. What they don’t want to forget may be a past event that is signified by the item being hoarded, or they may hoard things that they want to “get to” later. I keep lists as a way of not forgetting things I’m interested in. I gather extra stuff around me as a way of making life meaningful or to comfort myself. I also hold onto things that have sentimental value. I still have my first stuffed animal and all my childhood journals and many of my children’s books.

Having my lists doesn’t mean I don’t have lots of stuff. What I have the most of are books, followed by skeins of yarn, followed by CD’s and DVD’s. It’s pretty common for people to have lots of these things, so you might wonder what makes one person a hoarder and another just a collector. As far as I can tell it’s a difference in compulsion or control. I have lots of compulsion and not very much control. I buy things not just when I don’t need them, but when I shouldn’t.

Buying items happens in a chain of events for me. First I get really interested in something. This might be a writer or a yarn or a time period or a historical figure or a hobby. Then I’ll research that thing, doing internet searches and reading articles. I won’t think about much else. I’ll be completely lost in the search for this thing. When I do find things related to it that I can buy I’ll think that it’s really, really important to buy them immediately. If the things are on sale or in a limited edition, then the sense of immediacy will increase dramatically. I’ll believe it’s my last chance. This especially happens with yarn because there are always good sales and yarn companies are always discontinuing things. Here’s where the list-keeping helps. If I can get past the belief that it’s my last chance (always with the companion belief that I really need this thing) to buy something then I put it in one of my queues.

The difference between keeping the lists and having the things is that one creates a fantasy and a sense of possibility, while the other acts as a form of comfort and security. My lists give me something to strive toward and imagine. My yarn stash is a cocoon and my books are an escape. It’s ironic that in turning to things for comfort, I create stress by crowding my home or spending money I don’t have. By writing this blog and doing something meaningful, I hope to need those things a little less.

Below is a link for the book Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. One of its central characters is a hoarder and the descriptions of living with hoarding are very accurate.

http://www.amazon.com/Housekeeping-Novel-Marilynne-Robinson/dp/B0013TFBEC/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209754983&sr=1-1