Well, this isn’t what I thought my first post of the new year would be about. If you saw my last post of 2022, you’ll know I made…a lot of things last year. And that post just included the samples I made and was able to show, let alone the half-dozen more that I made during 2022 but are still under wraps. It was a good year—a watershed year in the life of Red Earth Design Studio—and I am thankful for it.
Around the end of October my creativity and desire to knit started flagging slightly, after months of knitting pedal to the metal. Normally this just means my brain is tired of doing math. Math and I have a contentious relationship that, while it is the basis of my career, could probably be the subject of a sitcom; but I digress. Thinking that’s all it was, I decided to take a few weeks’ break from sample knitting and dove into the Indie GAL and the Fasten-Off YAL for some personal crafting. A couple weeks of blissfully knitting other peoples’ patterns should get me back on track like it always does, right?
Current Me to Past Me: That’s cute, Ruth; that’s real cute.
It didn’t come back. I chatted and crafted enthusiastically in both events for the first couple of weeks, but by the beginning of December I found I was doing anything and everything but crafting, and my ability to talk about crafting took a nose dive. The only remotely intelligent thing I could think of to say about others’ projects most of the time was “That’s gorgeous!” which is well and good, but it starts sounding low effort after a while. I ended up finishing only one of the 3 projects I started during the events, barely completed the test knit I’d committed to before taking a break, and didn’t finish the Christmas sweater I’d been planning for my mom for months. Not a lick of sample knitting got done all December and I fell off the face of the earth on Instagram. The holiday season was busy, and I was so tired I didn’t have the bandwidth to process what was happening until New Year’s Day rolled around and I realized how behind I was.
Y’all, I’m still behind.
Southernisms aside (yep, whenever I’m trying to create emphasis I start with y’all, if y’all hadn’t noticed by now…and there, I’m doing it again), I was kind of in shock when I realized what was happening. I haven’t been out of commission this long in years—I’m not myself when I don’t have yarn in my hands, right?
I live in the country, which means no city water (actually much more pleasant than it may sound), so the used-to-death creative well analogy is actually quite close to home for me. My well brings up water at a rate of about 8 gallons per minute—enough to take a shower, run a load of laundry, and maybe do some dishes at once without being reduced to a pitiful trickle from all three. (Don’t try to water the grass at the same time, though; that’s pushing it too far.) But a curious thing happens occasionally: if the well pump has been running too long and feeding too many pipes at once, everything shuts off.
You see, the pumps gets water out of a reservoir in the ground that is fed by an aquifer, hundreds of feet of clay and granite below the surface. But if the pump’s been going too long, the reservoir empties faster than the aquifer feeds it, and you have to go without water for a few hours while slowly, slowly, the reservoir fills up again.
Turns out all 2022, I was pumping water at 100 gallons per minute when the reservoir fills up at 10 gallons per minute. And while the reservoir was deep and got me through the year, eventually math (of course it’s you, my old enemy…) caught up to me.
And here I am, still waiting for the reservoir to fill up.
It’s not complete shutdown anymore, thankfully. The last week or so I’ve been able to pick up my needles and get the bare minimum I need to done so I can stay (sort of) on deadline. I still don’t enjoy it; it’s a duty rather than the thrill it usually is to watch the fabric grow and feel the yarn in my fingers. But at least I’m doing it, and that’s enough for now. I confessed to my newsletter subscribers yesterday that this is what’s happened, and the encouraging emails they sent in response have given me the boost I need to keep doing what needs to be done and let the rest lie for now. And in the meantime, I’ll be resting, thinking, and pursuing other creative things to give my brain and my hands a break. They deserve it after last year.
I was really hoping to write this post after the burnout had passed, and to offer some cheery self-helpy advice on how to cope with such mini misfortunes as losing one’s mojo. Burnout? Pfffft, you got this, believe in yourself! This isn’t that kind of a post, unfortunately; or maybe fortunately. There are enough people out there writing about how to escape burnout far more competently than I. But what I can offer is this: pace yourself. Don’t do what I did last year, even though the professional benefits of what I did last year have been many. And if you’re like me and prone to the comparison game, I want you to know that last year’s wins came at a cost to my mental health and I am trying to not only bounce back from that, but take care of my health better in the coming year. To paraphrase Puddleglum the Marsh-Wiggle, success isn’t all fricaseed frogs and eel pie.
But if you do find yourself like me, be gentle on yourself and know it’s okay to muddle through sometimes. It’s okay to rest and let the well fill up again.
