Three years ago, almost exactly, I started this blog. There was, and continues to be, no particular theme other than the ramblings of my generally stress-addled brain. Graduate student life is particularly bizarre and, as it happens, difficult to explain. Dissertation writing is even more so, tenfold.
In the last few months, as you already know, I started to knit; I last knit some time around 1981, when this photo was taken. I'm pretty sure that's as big as that "scarf" ever got before I put down the needles in utter frustration. But it turns out that knitting is an amazingly helpful hobby when you're writing your dissertation if for no other reason than that pretty much every time you sit down to work on it you can see the progress. Ten more rows done, one episode of Boston Legal watched, and all is well.
Dissertation writing is hardly that rewarding. Because writing is a forever ongoing process. You write a few words, a sentence, a paragraph, whatever, but you're going to read that paragraph over and edit it (a few times); you're going to give that essay over to someone else and they're going to have a whole list of changes for you to make. Even a finished product is never done. It can be (or, well, is) agonizing to write much of the time (in a good way) as you sort through the thousand trails of ideas and thoughts and books and conversations you've had and weave them into some vaguely cohesive document. This is always how writing is and has been.
Last week, after a particularly bad day, I was talking to a friend about how frustrated I had become with a hat I was making; it's an easy pattern and I'd already had to rip out and re-do a chunk of it. Now I'd have to totally undo another big piece. Knitting, in my world, is the anti-writing. Knitting just is. Sometimes it gets confusing and you have to look at things closely, or unravel a bit to fix something, but usually it's pretty smooth sailing.
I was struggling to remember that, in fact, this is completely wrong. Experienced knitters constantly rip out entire projects and re-start them to adjust any number of things. And I am not an experienced knitter.
The frustration of knitting mistake is not just that I didn't get it right the first time. Though, yes, that's frustrating. It's more that there is a kind of feeling of loss at ripping out pretty decent work. That sounds melodramatic, maybe, but it's true. A lot of time and energy went into it and it's just being erased without a trace. Sometimes in writing this happens, but it is rarely on the same scale; a paragraph may get cut (or moved to the footnotes), but large pieces of hard-earned writing are almost never just slashed.
My friend, evidently, has a far clearer understanding of these things. While I'd spent part of the evening trying to convince myself that, no, it wouldn't be a big deal to fix the hat, and I should get a grip, she already had already chatted with another friend about how knitting is really a process, like writing.
Cooking, she thinks, doesn't come with the same devastation and loss at this kind of failure and, honestly, I think I agree.
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