Your Story is My Favourite Story

I’ve always felt my age to be an indescribably liminal thing. If I were to be completely unfiltered about it, I’d say it’s like I’m 5 and 60 years old at the same time: both pressed by the weight of responsibility and maturity of someone twice my age (my life required me to grow up pretty quickly) and then seemingly in the next breath or day dream a rambunctious hyper little kid that wants to do and be everything and seize all that life has to offer in one firestorm of a moment. Or one firestorm of a sentence.

I learned recently that this clashing of worlds, of ages, of timelines and my constant sense of urgent busyness occurs because I have ADHD. But like most girls, high functioning as I am despite my intractability and my inability to sit still or finish all the visions I begin, I wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood.

I am now 29. Old enough to know better one might say. But also old enough that I now have the hindsight to understand and be able to see a lot of my previous idiosyncrasies with fresh eyes. For what they really were. And to understand that all the crafts and projects that litter the timeline of my life, are there because they were one of the only things that could tether me to a now that didn’t slip through my fingertips as easily as all my other moments.

I don’t recall ever being able to sit still, unoccupied for more than five minutes at a time. At least not without feeling like I might burst at the seams. So I learned to stitch things together. Literally and figuratively.

Yes. I learned that I could anchor myself to earth with a needle and thread; that I could weave, through my moments, a line of colour that would keep me here, that would allow me to be still while my fingers ran through worlds and stories, with and without me.

Cross stitch let me tie all my lose ends up. With each stitch my life became a little steadier, a little more sensible, at little less chaotic. I could be sixty and whatever childish age I was at the same time and no one was the wiser.

It was the perfect remedy for all the visions and uncertainties brimming inside. And once I got the hang of it, I could let my hands do the work, while I remained here. I did it when I watched TV, or more recently, when I listened to a podcast, or talked on the phone to a friend -my hands staying busy so my mind didn’t have to. One in one out. A steady rhythm to keep beat when everything else seemed off kilter. And the occasional prick of a not-fully-paid-attention-to needle was sometimes all I needed to remind me of the importance of being truly here.

The first cross stitch I made as a child hangs on my grandmother’s kitchen sink window crossbar to this day. One singular red and yellow pansy, reminiscent of the ones we grew in our garden two thousand miles away from where my grandma lived. The pansy was held in a circular frame, made from one of those patterns with all the x’s pre-drawn on it for precision and learning. That’s when I’d still been green. Before I knew the x’s by heart.

I’d forgotten that I’d made that particular cross-stitch until recently, until I sent my grandmother the piece de resistance of my Covid quarantine crafts. Then she reminded me that I’d been doing this for a long time. It’s easy to forget through the scattering.

But I’m getting off track. As my writing usually does with the jumping around my brain does. Sometimes I like to let it though. Errant stitches across the page for abstract appeal.

The first cross stitch I made, getting back into it as an adult, was for a classic ADHD reason – although I didn’t know it at the time. I kept leaving my apartment with the oven left on. On several occasions I left it on with things still cooking in it and then went to work! My building manager was far too kind to me on those calls to, please, although I don’t know how much of an emergency it is, let themselves into my apartment to turn my oven off. This of course wouldn’t do. I wasn’t about to get evicted over some scorched sweet potatoes.

So I sat my scattered mind down for a few good nights of concerted talking to, while listening to a podcast on building better habits and made this:

I haven’t left the house with the oven on since.

Then came the Covid isolation crafts. My restlessness was at an all-time high when these started up. But it was going to be ok because the particular combination of meditative stitching and the ability to craft both word and art gave my cross-stitch thread a particular power to connect both my moments of uncertainty and me to my family separated across the country by the pandemic. This gave me purpose and clarity during my nights alone in my apartment, when I hadn’t yet figured out who I was supposed to be in social isolation. I sent the culmination of my figuring-outs to my mom and her sisters for the first Mother’s Day in quarantine any of us had lived through. Colourful threads weaving our lives together through time and space.

Next it was my Grandparent’s 75th wedding anniversary. A couple that’s lived through incredible hardships and still managed to plant the seeds for generations after them to thrive more than they could ever know. And because of Covid, they had to weather this monumental celebration without the company of their family that was the fruit of all their stalwart labours. So I did what I’d found to be the only thing that could bridge the holes in our scattered hearts: I pushed more embroidery floss through checked Aida cloth.

With each stitch I felt closer to them. Each stitch wove through the moments I sat in contemplation of their lives. Each cross of the letters of their story, a way to connect me to them through the fabric of time. My favourite story: My grandparents were married at the ages of 17 and 18 after both being orphaned at 14. Their love story is also one of childhood limitlessness being woven through lives that were always older than they’d expected to be.

As anyone with ADHD knows, deriving a sense of meaning out of your day or the various experiences that make up a life, can be confusing and difficult. I sort of describe it as trying to catch quicksilver with a net with an ever changing weave. What follows most of yours days is a sense of forlorn futility. This is because it’s difficult to tie together a purposeful conclusion or summary of what just happened and what something means, in order to give it particular significance, when your brain thinks every detail is important, and is never fully sure what focal point to rest on and absorb. But writing helps organize and make it real. Especially when you have to sit with that writing through each stitch to make it whole, to make it clear, to make it all make sense.

And if a simple act of thread and cloth, can help weave together time, family and lives scattered across space and generations, well that might just be enough to make meaning not so hard to come by. It might make having a neuro-atypical brain all the less strange, and all the more beautiful. And to me that's happiness.

Thank you.