I am throwing my pindrop of a voice into the strange and hectic ocean we call the internet. A woman who prefers to limit social interactions to face to face encounters, I find myself chronically ill, lonely, and not often able to leave my house.
I have a disease called IC (though technically i am still awaiting a diagnosis) The condition is a chronic inflammation of the bladder, with symptoms that are like a an extreme bladder infection. It is considered an auto-immune disease by some, and there is no cure known to western medicine.
This is the sterile prophylactic version of events. My version is I HURT LIKE HELL. It feels like someone’s stabbing me in the pelvis with a rusty sword while i sit impaled on fiery spikes. Some days I have to pee approximately every 6 seconds, and other days, my bladder closes shop and doesn’t let me pee at all. I’ve lost thirty pounds on at least 87 blasted woo woo diets, that leave me starving, ready to eat an elephant raw, but don’t make me feel better. And f—ing is just out of the question. I can’t drink booze or eat chocolate, travel or go to parties. My friends rarely visit me, and I vacilate between wild and spurious hope, and soul drenching despair.
Guess you can see why no one wants to come to my house to play! What a boner kill! A former homesteader in rural Maine who hauls her own water and chops her own wood, political activist working for environmental and social justice, and a radical homeschooling mother of two, my active life has certainly taken an about face. The one thing these circumstances have not been able to strip me off is my compulsive obsession with needle crafting.
I knit and crochet for hours everyday. My loft is bursting with wildly tangled skeins of yarn. My desk is threatening to collapse under the weight of piles of books and magazines about the yarnier side of life. I sketch and design in a notebook that never leaves my side, and I spend most of my computer time cruising Ravelry, and adding items to my Etsy shop.
Originally, I wanted to keep a blog about my crochet and knitting addiction, like so many before me, but needlecrafts have moved to the center of my life because of my illness, and the silver lining and the cloud are skipping hand in hand together. In my political struggles, the desire for self-determination has been the core value that has fueled my fire. The definition of self determination according to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs is: “the right for all people to determine their own social, political, economic, and cultural development.” It means that we as people, families and communities know what is best for us, know what we need and have the right to make those decisions for ourselves. Working towards that goal, for me, means making sure I can take care of myself and my family so that it will be harder to take my freedom away. It means growing my own food, making my own medicine, my own music, and my own clothes. All of these things get me closer to being self-determinate, and lessen the chances that I will have stood in the way of someone else’s way to be self-determinate. (For example, if I grow my own food, than I don’t have to worry about there being poison in it, or have to deal with any government regulation around food, and it keeps me independent of rising food costs incurred by the depletion of cheap oil. Meanwhile, I know that somebody else didn’t have to break their back on my behalf while I sit around and loaf, and I know that the person who picked my food isn’t getting cancer from pesticides, or being paid less than minimum wage.) See? My self-determination and theirs.
What in the hell does this have to do with chronic illness and knitting, you ask? That is the connection that this blog will explore, as you get to follow me through doctor office adventure to craft store, from private art to public pain, from the forest I call my home to the threads flying in my lap in my sickbed. Stay tuned for more rants and ravings from your favorite sickly yarn addict!
