Home Ec

When I was in serious therapy, sometimes I was too deeply depressed to open up to my counselor about what was bothering me, so he would give me some paper and some colored pencils and ask me to draw something. The original idea was that if I felt too threatened to say something, I should draw a picture of it instead. But for some reason the act of drawing helped me relax enough that I was able to talk to him and start telling him things again. He said he loved watching me create because it changed my whole demeanor when I was making something.

That was years ago, but I find that when I'm struggling with a severe bout of depression, I can choose to either wallow or...create. The wallowing is easy. You just sit on the couch with the TV on and think about how much you hate your life. Then you cry. Getting up and going through one's fabrics, reading pattern instructions, scouting out the ironing board and iron that your husband put "away," that's harder. It requires me to concentrate on something other than the hopeless void of reality.

Knowing all of this, and also being aware that sewing is a lot cheaper than additional therapy without insurance, I used my final paycheck to spring for an online sewing class. The class is for beginners, and I feel like I'm probably at the intermediate level, but I will be learning a few new techniques and getting out of my comfort zone a little. And it gives me something useful to do. Like make the little quilted pincushion pictured above.

My favorite thing about this class is that it teaches sewing without a pattern, which is really fun. It's kind of like extreme crafts. Also, there's something automatically soothing about the sound of the sewing machine motor, maybe because this very sound provided background noise for my entire childhood, as my mother is an expert seamstress and sews all the time.

My goals for tomorrow are to complete the shopping bag project for class and dig out the rough draft of my book and get the first chapter revised and uploaded onto webooks. Yeah. Tomorrow.