The Unraveling

*The Unraveling*

How a tangled skein of yarn taught me to knit my life back together.

The blue-green skein of merino wool sat in my lap like a sleeping dragon—beautiful, complex, and utterly chaotic. I’d bought it on impulse three months ago, back when "new hobbies" felt like lifelines. Learn to knit, the internet promised, it’s therapeutic. What the tutorials didn’t mention was how a single dropped stitch could unravel your entire sense of sanity.

It started simply enough. After work, I’d sit by the window, needles clicking, weaving rows of clumsy garter stitch while the city hummed below. Knitting became my anchor—a ritual to mute the noise of layoffs at the office, my mother’s declining health, and the quiet loneliness that had seeped into my apartment like fog. For an hour each evening, I wasn’t Maya the anxious project manager; I was Maya, maker of lopsided scarves.

Then came the migraine—a three-day siege that left me groggy and disoriented. When I finally returned to my knitting basket, I found disaster. The delicate jade yarn had slipped off the needle, collapsing into a bird’s nest of knots. My half-finished shawl now resembled a tumbleweed. I tugged gently. A loop tightened. I pulled harder. The knots cinched like fists.

"No," I whispered, tears pricking my eyes. It felt absurd, crying over yarn. But in that mess of fiber, I saw my life: carefully built, then suddenly collapsed. My job felt unstable. My mother’s calls grew shorter, her voice thinner. Even my friendships had frayed from neglect. I was 34, and everything I touched seemed to unravel.

Frustrated, I threw the knot into a drawer. Forget it, I told myself. Buy new yarn. But the tangle haunted me. It sat there, a silent accusation of my own impatience. So one rainy Tuesday, I dumped it onto the kitchen table, brewed strong coffee, and resolved: Fix it or throw it away. No in-between.

Hours passed. My fingers worked slowly, tracing threads like archeologists brushing dust from relics. Some knots loosened with gentle persuasion. Others required strategic snips with tiny scissors. I learned to read the yarn’s language—the tight spirals that signaled panic, the loose bends where patience could slip through. My neck ached. My coffee went cold. But slowly, impossibly, the knot began to breathe.

As I worked, memories surfaced. My grandmother’s hands, swift and sure as she knitted sweaters for us grandkids. "Knots aren’t mistakes, Maya," she’d say in her warm Punjabi. "They’re just stories waiting to be understood." I’d rolled my eyes then. Now, her words felt like prophecy.

By midnight, the yarn lay smooth again, coiled neat as a promise. I held it up, exhausted but triumphant. It wasn’t just about salvaging wool—it was realizing that some messes could be undone. Not quickly, not easily, but thread by thread.

The next morning, I called my mother. Instead of our usual rushed updates, I asked about her childhood. She told me about monsoon rains flooding her village, how she’d knit socks to trade for rice. Her voice lifted, bright as I hadn’t heard it in months. That conversation became our new ritual—a slow unraveling of her stories, one memory at a time.

At work, I started tackling problems like I’d tackled the yarn: not with frantic force, but with focused persistence. When a client project imploded, I gathered my team. "Show me where the knots are," I said. We mapped the tangles—communication gaps, unclear deadlines—and picked them apart, one by one. We didn’t fix it overnight, but we stopped fearing the mess.

As for the shawl? I finished it last week. It’s full of imperfections—a dropped stitch here, a tension wobble there. But when I wrap it around my shoulders, it feels like armor. Soft, flawed, and fiercely mine.

Funny, isn’t it? We spend so much energy running from tangles—in relationships, careers, our own minds. We fear the knots mean we’ve failed. But maybe the knots are the work. The place where we slow down, lean in, and learn what we’re made of. Where patience becomes power.

My yarn dragon didn’t need slaying. It needed understanding. And these days, when life inevitably snarls again? I take a breath, find an end, and begin.

One gentle tug at a time.

THANKS FOR READING

BY ZIAFAT ULLAH.