Knitting Myself Back Together: Personal Narrative Analysis

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Knitting Myself Back Together When I decided this past summer to move into my own apartment after years of living with roommates, my anxiety took over completely.
"Idiot," it hissed after I signed a lease on a beautiful little place in a not so nice area. "How do you think you're ready for this? You can't afford it, it's not safe, you'll regret it, you chose wrong." One day, shortly before I moved, I stayed home from work because I had such a strong panic attack that I threw up all over my sheets. I put the sheets in the bathtub, called my mom, and then, in order to stave off another wave of nausea, began knitting a blood-red sweater.
My knitting calms my anxiety by about a decade. I learned when I was 6, making washcloths and doll blankets. Then years later moving on to lace cardigans, dresses, and a lifetime supply of mismatched mittens. Those began in 2011, the summer after high school, and the only time in my adult life I've been unemployed and truly depressed. I was competing for part-time jobs at Victoria's Secret and Sephora against people who had degrees in fashion merchandising. I felt useless and invisible, so I spent those three months waiting for my high school boyfriend to get out of his lifeguarding job. I would then pick fights with him and stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning …show more content…

During one of those nights of tv I started to obsess over books and YouTube videos, figuring out how to seam a shoulder or turn a heel. I knitted my first real sweater, a bright-yellow cropped cardigan I don't think I've ever worn. It didn't matter that the sleeves were too bulky or that the buttonholes didn't line up, here was something that was 100% mine, that seven days prior had been nothing but a pile of exceedingly raw materials. Nobody had asked me to knit or had given me permission; I just did it, and that power was enough to propel me into a summer of endless, woollen productivity. I could, in some small way, stop waiting to be

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