Writing and Crochet

Last night, my left wrist hurt really badly. Sharp, searing pain through the joint, bad enough that I put down the project I was working on and started searching for connections between crochet and carpal tunnel syndrome and wrist braces. They’ve been hurting more or less for months now. I didn’t want to stop crocheting. This is a big project and the first one I’ve ever built from scratch (well, as from scratch as any piece of crochet can be, given that, like writing, you’re often doing a variation on a theme that you saw or learned from before) but I could barely hold the fabric and yarn, so I put it down for the night.

I started crocheting last year while I was rehabbing my left elbow that I’d shattered in a fall. I was also looking for a way to distract myself from social media, from my phone, from everything that was taking me away from life around me. I chose crochet because it was something that I had to focus on solely. Especially at first, I couldn’t count stitches even with music playing, and I certainly couldn’t read a news feed or watch a tv show. It helped some, though I often found I would get just as absorbed in making stitch after stitch as I did in doom-scrolling my Twitter feed. At least I didn’t hate the world when I was interrupted from crochet.

Crochet also meant that I was alone in my head a lot more, which put me on the path to writing again, at least a little. I’m still working on improving that, but I have more drafts in the last year than probably in the three previous. I need that enforced silence. But the poems aren’t right yet, though I may have found something in my wrist pain that will at least give me something to think about.

See, when I got up this morning, I picked up my project again, determined to get at least a couple of rows done before I started searching for wrist braces again. But I held everything gingerly, almost falling out of my hands, letting the hook do the work. I relaxed into it, and I realized after a couple of rows that in all my projects lately, I’ve been trying to muscle through, making the stitches really tight. I was building my stress into the project, and the project was feeding that back into my hands, causing them to cramp. But when I gentled my grip, not only did my wrists not hurt, but the stitches came more easily.

The last six months have been a test of letting go for me, of recognizing that I can’t control the world around me, that people I know and love, maybe even me, are going to get sick and die even if they/we take every precaution. But if I hold it all too tightly, I’ll just cramp up and lose what I love. I have to hold things gently. And I think that’s what I need to do with my poems too. I’m holding them too tightly, and not trusting that they’ll stay in my hands if I loosen my grip on them. I don’t know what that’s going to look like yet, but for the first time in a long time, I at least have a sense of how I’m going to approach it.