So, picture this. You, alone. In that white room from The Matrix. You know. The Construct — a virtual work space created to run simulations. Okay so you’re there. You look great. For real! You do. Okay. In this room you’re holding a ball of yarn. Pick a colour, it helps, I swear. This yarn represents your brain — your memories, experiences, values, ideals, everything. For many of us, we walk around holding it. It’s the ball of yarn that we were given. Why would we have reason to question it? It’s ours. Our entire family knows us as Deirdre, the one with the blue ball of yarn. But sometimes, we start to ask questions about this yarn. Questions like:

1. Why is it blue?

2. Where did it come from?

3. What happens when I pull this end? What about that end? Can I cut it?

4. What happens when I drop it? Twist it? Braid it?

5. Do I have to have this one forever?

6. Can I trade my ball in? Can I dye it?

You get it.

Sidenote: I’m addicted to metaphors. Perhaps, we should have metaphor Monday. Where y’all give me a weird topic and I’ll flesh out a tangental metaphor to help us all understand it better.

Still with me here? Okay great.

So for those of us that start to have questions, we slowly start to answer them. In trying to understand all the ways that we have become deeply, ourselves, we start to interact with the ball of yarn. A second side note: If you’re familiar with skeins of actual yarn, you can sometimes pull from the centre of the ball, or the outside. Pulling from the centre sometimes results in what knitters/crocheters colloquially refer to as “yarn barf”. A mass of tangled yarn pulled out from the centre of the ball.

So you start trying to find the end of this thing. As you do, you pull out yarn barf, create knots, spend time walking around the (now developed) rooms of the construct. All in an effort to … understand this yarn. Detangle it. Make sense of it. See what it’s made of.

If there is an order to things, it’s easier to both understand why, and also predict what may happen next.

During the process of interacting with this ball, you’re creating a giant web of yarn. A matrix, if you will. Where the more you work to detangle, uncover and sort out … the more knotted it actually becomes. The old adage of the more I learn, the less I know, is especially relevant here. The deeper we dig, the more we uncover. But…

To add an extra layer of complication, this process that you’re going through with your yarn and hyper-fixation on that one knot despite it being one of like … 6,000 far more complicated ones, does not exist in a vacuum. You bet your sweet ass it doesn’t. Unfortunately, while we’re linearly staring down at our hands, and bumping into other people, those people aren’t just standing there with their hands behind their backs like curious math teachers. OH NO. They’re literally interacting with your yarn.

Pulling it, splitting the strands, wet felting it (I don’t know), and attaching parts of THEIR OWN yarn ball to you. Your blue yarn in this one spot is now purple, cause old so and so attached their red yarn to you. So now, changes in their movement directly affect yours.

So a few things can happen from here. Most notably: overwhelm. Where do we even START? Should we just toss this entire situation and get a new yarn ball? Perhaps if instead of doing anything at all, we’ll just sit down in the middle of it. If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, right? Our body weight creating a mass of knots and unpleasant odours that start to compound over time, so much so that we’re afraid to ever stand up again.

Or, we get right properly rammy. That’s the technical term for people who are hot-headed and impatient. We start running around like a bull in a china shop, hoping that sheer speed and determination will just sort a lot of this out for us, instead of walking through it mindfully. This method results in chaos, running, fire and a lot of burnt fibres, especially the ones where connections to others are found.

Or sometimes, we think if we just … talk nicely enough to the yarn, treat it tenderly enough, be patient and caring enough, eventually it’ll make sense, unwind, and wrap itself in a nice little ball for us to carry around.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend a significant amount of time in all of those places at one time or another. My most enduring time spent pretending that nothing was happening at all, and just slowly letting the yarn pile up around me in this horrible chaotic mess that seemed impossible to free myself from, continuing to get more and more knotted and confusing.

So here’s what I’ve come to think is generally true:

1. The yarn will never make sense. Never. Not one time. It’s yarn! It’s fickle as hell. It will knot to spite you if you look at it the wrong way. AND depending on its material, it’s often just easier to cut it than spend a decade trying to pull out a single knot.

2. Spending every last ounce of energy understanding how the yarn got all dicked in the first place, doesn’t actually make you feel better. Now you feel overwhelmed, but HEY at least you know WHY.

3. Despite every best effort, you can’t actually control how other people try to interact with your yarn. But you CAN do the best you can when it comes to reinforcing the yarn, constructing barriers between your yarn, and other peoples yarn, and trusting that you do in fact know what’s best for the yarn. As the goddamn owner of it.

4. Your disaster of yarn, is unique to you. Isn’t that … wholesome? Like fingerprints, we each have our own special cocktail of yarn colour, material, speed of fuckery, speed of unknotting, etc. etc. etc. So spending all your time wondering why yours doesn’t look like Carol’s is futile. You’re. Not. Carol.

5. It’s super normal to own a yarn ball.

6. You CAN untangle, dye it, tie it to others, create systems to manage walking through it easier for you, make art out of it, or even bury it in a big ass, dark box in the back of your closet (this option will haunt you though, trust). It’s yours — and yours alone — to do with what you want.

7. You cannot drop your hot mess of a yarn ball in the lap of someone else and say, ‘fix this for me please’. It will backfire. Every single time.

And above all else, look up once in a while, yeah? Breathe in the outside air. Listen to the birds. Your only job on this earth isn’t to stare at the mess beneath your feet (or the hyper-organized paralyzing one) and try to pick apart where you went “wrong”. There is no one way. Just, your way.