Letting Go

Today I packed up stuff I’ve been hanging on to for years to take to the thrift store. I feel like a new being.

I’m a writer but I’m also a knitter. Many other writers are also knitters (cough, cough, Barbara Kingsolver). It’s a hobby that soothes the mind and quiets the hands and makes you mad but in a fixable way. If you mess up you just knit back, unravel, pick up the dropped stitch or smudge over your mistakes by sewing closed the holes. If you don’t like the end product, you simply don’t wear it, you give it away, or you rip it out and make it into something better. It’s akin to writing in a way, but also not. If you knit from a pattern, someone else has already done the work of structuring and creating. You simply pick your yarn and your colors and turn their idea into something that holds you within it. It is a beautiful, artistic symbiosis.

Like most long-time knitters, I have acquired a good amount of yarn (aka: stash), the bits and bobs leftover from finished products, yarn that I’ve bought for one purposed then decided not to do the project, and the gifts from other knitters. So many gifts.

What I’ve learned over the years is that lurking in everyone’s house there are corners, bins, bags and bags of unwanted yarn. People have feelings about throwing unused supplies away and when those people hear that I knit they suddenly have an out. Katie will take it.

Katie used to take it.

Way back, when I started knitting, I was poor. Like, I could keep a roof over my head but that was about it poor. Yarn money was not there. And, in case you’ve never checked, yarn is expensive. So I accepted every gift gratefully. Anything that could fuel my hobby for free was amazing. And I made stuff. Probably not great stuff but functional objects, warm things, probably a little weird.

Fast forward to today…or a couple of weeks ago. I’m in my mid-forties, shit’s falling apart around and inside me (why Body? why?) everything is everywhere and I can’t take it anymore. The bits and bobs that were once a blessing are now a burden and they have to go. I have multiple yarn storage locations in my house. The upstairs ones are focused on current or recent projects and the downstairs location holds everything else.

I don’t have a problem getting rid of things. I’m the opposite. I have, more than once, gotten rid of something then had to go buy it again because I needed it. I don’t care. Space and sanity are precious. But, I am not immune to second thoughts. Two weeks ago I went through my upstairs yarn with a hard heart and a culling mindset and bagged it up for the thrift store. Then I let it sit. And I looked at it. And I thought, this is nice yarn. Then I let it sit some more. I looked through it again. And again.

Today, I thought, nope it’s gotta go. There’s yarn from my first sweater in there, there’s yarn from all the things I’ve made over the years. The problem is those things aren’t me anymore. Neither is the horde of yarn in my basement. That’s gotta go too.

I have a set of china that I bought in my late twenties. I thought it was beautiful at the time. I thought I would be a fancy lady who ate every meal off of fancy china and it would be great. Except, the bowls are incredibly small, the teacups don’t hold enough coffee—or tea, and the different plates are both too big and too small for the meals I like to eat. Instead of being a fancy lady who drinks tea with her pinky finger out while wearing a feather boa, I’ve only used parts of the set occasionally when I’ve had too many people at my house for my regular dishes.

I packed that up too today too.

I would rather eat off of the Ikea set that looks like earthenware than those dishes that don’t match my life with paper plates for parties. They don’t fit me. Perhaps they never have. In any case, I do not like them enough to keep them in my kitchen anymore.

It’s taken me a long time to let go of these things, to realize that maybe the future person that past me thought was coming is never going to show up. There’s a little bit of grief in that. Grief that the woman who could whip out amazing knitwear from a disorganized collection of miniscule scraps just isn’t me. She’s probably really cool, but she’s not me. Grief that the fancy lady who is throwing dinner parties for twelve with everything made from scratch, pristine house, perfectly coiffed hair and well dressed is never going to be me. I bet she has great gossip.

But this Letting-go has given me buoyancy, freedom. I am no longer constrained to the past by my things. I am no longer obligated to find just the right pattern, or idea that melds all of the lost, orphan yarn balls together. My space is free from musty ideas that don’t fit me anymore.

My kitchen, my home, holds space for current me and the me I will become.