One Strand at a Time

I realised something this morning.

I am not sure when it changed. I am not sure how. But somewhere in my fifties, quietly and without announcement, something shifted — and I only noticed it today, sitting alone with my knitting and the sounds of whatever is happening outside.

Let me go back to the beginning.

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The Noise

As a teenager, a young woman, and a young mother, I made bad decisions. Real ones. The kind that leave marks.

Self-forgiveness is one of the hardest things I know. For many years I refused to let my thoughts go anywhere near those decisions. I did not want to revisit them. I did not want to hear the words again inside my own head. I did not want to feel whatever was attached to each one — the hurt, the anger, the shame, all of it preserved in amber exactly as I had left it.

So I made noise.

I was always with somebody. Or I had loud music on and I sang along with genuine enthusiasm. Anything — any sound, any distraction, any company — to keep my thoughts from going where I did not want them to go.

I would never have sat in silence. Silence was where the skeletons lived.

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The Psychologist

About ten years ago I thought perhaps I should try therapy.

I booked an appointment. I sat down across from a man I had never met and realised, almost immediately, that I had nothing to say. Not because there was nothing — there was everything. But I looked at this stranger and could not work out how one begins to hand a life story to someone who was not there for any of it.

He tried. He asked questions. I answered as little as I could. Eventually I stood up and walked out.

I do not think it was his fault. I think I was not ready. I knew the baggage was there — I had been carrying it for years — but I was not yet willing to set it down, even briefly, even in a room specifically designed for that purpose.

I was not ready to look.

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What Changed

Somewhere in my fifties, I stopped needing the noise.

I cannot tell you exactly when. It was not a decision I made consciously. It was more like noticing one day that I was sitting alone, in quiet, and my thoughts were going exactly where they had always been forbidden to go — and I was letting them.

Knitting did this. I am certain of it, even if I cannot fully explain the mechanism.

When my hands are occupied with something repetitive and familiar — something that does not require my eyes or my full attention — my mind is free to go wherever it needs to go. And somewhere along the way, I stopped directing it away from the difficult places.

Now, when I knit, I allow my thoughts to wander wherever they want.

I often sit alone, with only the sounds of nature and the rhythmic clicking of my needles. No music. No company. Just the knitting and whatever my mind brings forward.

It has become something sacred to me. Something holy.

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The Skeletons

We all have skeletons in the closet.

For years I thought it was only bad people like me who had them. The older I get, the more I understand that is simply not true. We all have them. We all carry baggage from past mistakes, past decisions, past versions of ourselves who did not yet know what we know now. And that baggage can become very heavy. Very overwhelming.

What I have come to understand — slowly, through many hours of knitting and thinking — is this: the decisions I made were made by a person who did not yet have the life experience or the framework of reference that I have today. I did not have the tools. I did not have the knowledge. I made the decisions I made with what I had at the time, which was considerably less than what I have now.

That does not make them right. But it makes them human.

These days, when a skeleton surfaces — when a thought arrives that I would once have drowned in music or conversation — I let it come. I take it out. I dust it off. I look at it carefully, for as long as it needs. I turn it over in my hands.

And by the time I am done, I have knitted a great many rows.

And somehow, when I put the skeleton away, I feel lighter than I did before.

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Why I Call It Sacred

Therapy is a wonderful tool. I know this. For many people it is transformative and I do not say any of this to suggest otherwise.

It did not work for me. Perhaps the timing was wrong. Perhaps I was not ready. Perhaps some things need to be processed in private, in your own time, in your own way — without a stranger asking questions you are not yet ready to answer.

I had to reach my fifties. I had to knit. I had to discover that the rhythmic clicking of needles could create a space in which the difficult thoughts were safe to arrive and safe to leave.

I am cutting ties with old mistakes one strand at a time. One knitting session at a time.

It is slow work. But then — slow is something I have learned to trust.

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A Note

If you are carrying something heavy today, I am not going to tell you that knitting will fix it. I do not know your story and I would not presume.

But I will say this: if you have been running from your own thoughts for a long time, there might come a day when you are ready to stop. When the silence stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like an invitation.

When that day comes — pick up your needles. Or your hook. Or whatever it is that keeps your hands busy and your mind free.

And let the thoughts come.

You might be surprised what you are ready for.