High Above Water

Moving back home after living in a densely populated metropolis wasn’t what I would describe as easy. None of it was easy, but especially re-acclimating to the emptiness, the agile and arid wind, the unending winter and the acute isolation. It wasn’t easy because I knew all the reasons I left.

When I realized I was more or less obligated to settle in, making the most of it was my only option. I’d re-learn about the land, I’d do my part toward conservation, I’d come to understand the local politics, I’d look upon the place with fresh eyes. My dreams and aspirations as I’d known them might have to be abandoned, but maybe they could be replaced by others. I’d be there for my dad, who needed a friend after the clean splitting up of our nuclear family. I’d stay there for three years.

It wasn’t easy, reconnecting with such vacuity so abruptly. My neural pathways and neuroses were trained to be maximally overstimulated and overextended. It wasn’t healthy, it was hellish, but it had become my mode. What had so long been my home, then, felt strange and alien. I needed to find activities.

My childhood bed had been replaced with a twin-sized day bed. This meant there was a bit of room on the floor that could be dedicated to projects. It wasn’t a studio, but it was a space.

I was running errands, buying a shirt and a pair of pants for my new job at a local restaurant. I went into a hardware store for a change of scenery and found the canvas drop cloths. I bought one.

There’s always been a struggle with anxiety here. The data regarding hypoxia (lack of oxygen) and its links to mental health has remained inconclusive, but I’ve come to wonder if it’s suspiciously accurate. In adulthood, especially, I can see the starkness of my body’s response to extreme elevation in real-time; never do I feel as consistently elevated in fight-or-flight as I do when I wake up at 10,500ft. Whatever the data concludes, I am certain of my own experience. Heart racing is relentless, and my body’s proclivity for transforming it to panic is just as stubborn. When I was young, I mitigated this with constant activity — school, extracurriculars, art. But this time around, all of that infrastructure had been sublimated. To stay here, I had to rebuild.

I knew, at home, there was a bin full of rags retired from primary kitchen use and set aside for cleaning. I knew that some of these were probably as old as I was and had developed a patina, a patchwork of mars and stains and therefore, character.

I didn’t know what I was doing, because I’d never attempted to make human-sized clothing without a pattern. But there’s something about desperation and urgency that drives people forward. The benevolent affordability of the fabrics liberated me from fear. Using a large, semi-translucent plastic bag, I traced pieces of a pre-existing pair of pants with a sharpie, and used a set of sewing shears my mom had left to cut the shapes out. This was my pattern. I laid them out and followed suit with the canvas drop cloth. My hands shook.

Very quickly, the problem solving required of this task took my mind away from the general sense of low-level foreboding I’d lived with for so much of my young adulthood. I remembered why I’d put myself through the wringer of obstacles my whole life — so that I could surmount small obstacles without having to confront the bigger one: mental illness. I realized how long I’d been in denial of this, how many times I’d pushed myself past my own limits into physical fatigue and subsequent ailments like chronic and acute gastrointestinal maladies, accidental anorexia, anemia. It was because I was afraid if I stopped, the monster would overtake me; and to be frank, it didn’t feel like an option.

Part of the reason I moved back home was because this pattern, hypoxia-inflated or not, was running me into the ground. In the city, it was simply a different type of monster I’d been trying to avoid. At least this one felt more familiar. I’d vowed, as part of leaving the city and many of my goals, friends, and comforts behind, I’d seek therapy from the base of my childhood home.

When turning the canvas into wearable objects, cutting belt loops and pockets from the patterned terry cloth dish rags, drawing patterns of my own with the same sharpies I used to outline the pieces, I knew I could do it. Traditional talk therapy would undoubtedly help; I’d surely find new avenues of coping. In the meantime, and in the absence of traditional therapy, I knew I had to find ways of coping on my own.

This was it. Using my hands, using deduction skills, synthesizing them. The goal was reachable and at the end, a bit of something useful.

The anxiety hasn’t gone away. My health insurance hasn’t covered traditional therapy for a number of years now, but I can always figure out how to make myself a pair of shorts, a pair of pants, a shirt, a dress. I can make gifts, I can spread this useful skill to the people I love. I can show them that they, too, can adopt something valuable just by giving it a try. I’m not doing it to make money, but what it’s given me is so much greater. It’s not a profession, but I can always learn more and it’s been an incomparable solution to smoothing the turbulence of mental illness. I hope I can lead by example for anyone struggling to find non-traditional ways to cope—that all someone needs is a pair of scissors and a few scraps of fabric, a sewing machine or a needle and thread, to find their own little slice of life-saving stability.