I woke up today quarantined in my childhood bedroom, almost excited to be awake. As soon as I finished doing the necessary waking-and-getting-up tasks, I sat down on my floor, picked up the sweater I’m currently working on, and immediately got to work sewing the knitted panels together with light pink yarn. It’s the first sweater, or cardigan, more properly, that I’ve ever made, even though I’ve been knitting for twelve years.
Or, rather, I’ve known how to knit for twelve years. My grandma taught me when I was in China for the summer, bored in my dad’s apartment in Shanghai and missing pepperoni (idk, I was a weird kid). I never finished a project until sophomore year of high school, probably because my first project at age six was a scarf and no kid has an attention span long enough to bang out one of those. Over quarantine in 2020, I knitted more, and in the last year or so, I’ve made scarves for three of my friends, my first hat, and am now almost done with my first cardigan. Oh, and I taught myself to crochet during winter break and made myself a shirt. This is just another addition to my ever-growing list of creative/productive hobbies, which includes baking, drawing and painting, writing poetry, gardening, embroidery, knitting, and now crochet as well. I want to try whittling, mosaic, making pottery, and so many more creative things! I get overwhelmed with how much I want to do, sometimes, that I almost forget that I have a chronic condition that makes it hard to do things.
That brings me to my main point: I think creating is an essential part of what we were meant to do. Humans take things and make them into other things. We build houses, we leave handprints on cave walls, we cook our meat; these are acts of transformation, of creation. Losing touch with that spirit of creativity, at least for me, will inevitably lead me to a meaningless existence and a profoundly unhappy state of being. No joke, not this time. Sometimes I want to work on a hobby project — maybe I want to give myself a new tattoo, maybe I want to paint on a pair of shoes, maybe I want to bake a three-tier chocolate cake with raspberry compote and dark chocolate ganache — and that’s the only thing that can motivate me to get out of bed and keep living. I use these things to motivate me: for example, the only thing getting me to write this post is the thought of getting to continue putting together my sweater. I think that’s an incredible power, the power of motivation, because I don’t have much energy to do things most days, and creation is what keeps me going.
Not everyone is like me. Not everyone enjoys creating, or feels this passionately about their hobbies, or has trouble getting out of bed. But when things feel overwhelming, maybe try a little creativity. Who knows? It might help.
