Thinking About Getting Into: Things I Can Do With My Hands

I've been thinking that I should resurrect this newsletter for weeks, but I faced a particular problem: I couldn't will myself to write.

That might sound like sheer laziness—and maybe it partially is—but it's also because, in this now month-plus of isolation, I've filled my non-working hours with things that set me far apart from my keyboard. I have been writing—I do it for a living—but early quarantine rhetoric about using this time to craft your own personal King Lear made the thought of eking out any "for fun" prose feel like a task. I would just be setting myself up for more personal disappointment.

I have a bad habit of eschewing things that I know will make me feel better in the long run. Over the past year, I've actually started to regularly exercise; but cooped up in my room, I can only muster the motivation to do a YouTube video from my favorite yoga studio once a week, if that. When I get around to it, I feel a little more stable, a little more relaxed. And I know that writing—for myself, not for money—comes with the same release. Still, the hill it takes to get to that point often seems too insurmountable to even begin to navigate. It is hard, when you're so trained to self-correct, to simply allow yourself to complete an activity through to the finish, and then consider how you might do it a little bit better the next time around. I can't write a paragraph lately without feeling a kind of stale coffee bitterness on my tongue. Already, I've used some form of the word "feel" four times in this newsletter. Make it five, I guess.

So instead, I've been doing things with my hands. Making sourdough, finally, as I've long thought of attempting (but now, this makes me a quarantine cliché). Painting with watercolors. Pulling out the Muji colored pencils that I bought my freshman year of college and loaned to countless people over the next four years. Crocheting a sweater. Embroidering another. Beading jewelry—another craft I learned that first semester of university, when I didn't have a lot of friends and would find myself at the free workshops in the student center taught by two kind older women. I had always considered myself aspirationally crafty—I was always good enough at making things that I might be the most DIY-inclined person in a friend group, or one of the "better" students in a middle school art class, but never quite that impressive under scrutiny. My drawings were not correctly proportioned. My stitches were sloppy.

The difference between now and then, I say, is that I've learned how to be a little more patient with myself. I can bear the emotional stress of having to undo several rows of miscounted crochet. I can wait for my watercolors to dry before I paint another layer. I can let the dough sit without poking at it, and I can place it in the oven without constantly turning the inner light on, just to glimpse in for proof that the work I had put in was coming to fruition.

But this newfound patience has a catch: It exists only in the short-term. I can handle the 24 hours it takes to create a loaf of bread, and I can finish a necklace within the two episodes of TV it takes to string together. Yet when I sit down to write, I can only feel a hollow in my chest as I will my fingers to tap out a story or a paragraph that I can read in that moment and think to myself, "This is good."

I'm having a hard time thinking about the future these days, which has tripped me into a sort of alternate reality, although one that I had been veering towards at least for the past year or so. I've spent most of my life looking straight forward, like so many other ambitious people, always imaging a firm end goal: An impressive byline. A praised position. An innate knack of digesting culture and spitting out analyses that held soundly against criticism (yet still offered some space for debate). I'd dreamt up such a future self that in the present, I could only feel frustrated that I wasn't yet where I wanted to be, and I was struck with a sense that I didn't have the tools—or talent—to get myself there.

I had tied so much of my perception into a career trajectory that when I lost my job in late 2018—at this point, just a common reality of working in media—I felt like I had also lost much of my sense of self. It's been a tough and tedious process unraveling my worth from my work.

Now, there is an even greater issue where The Future is concerned: That the day we speak of, "when this is all over," will come—or will it? And what will it look like? Will we yell to make our voices heard in loud bars? Will we look around to see if other people in the movie theater are crying at the previews? Will we meet people serendipitously and go in for a hug? The potential—no matter how big or small—for the answer to these questions to be met with a "no" makes my stomach turn; suddenly, for the first time in my life, I consider myself a "living in the present" kind of person, for fear that days ahead will be worse.

Which is why doing things with my hands feels, unlike most things, good. I can see how a necklace is turning out by lining up all the beads I want to use. I can use a paper towel to mop up a mistake I've made with my watercolors before it sets. I can bake the bread and see how it turns out, and if it's not that great? Oh well: It'll still probably taste just fine with butter and jam.

The immediacy of the act feels intimate and essential; to bring something into fruition not just from your mind, but from your fingers, doing something a little more active than just pressing keys on a laptop. The stories I feel like I can't yet pull forth may lay dormant a while longer, as I knead and stitch and bead. But for now, at least in a different sense than my usual, I can rest assured that the power to create a whole from mere parts—if not yet something from nothing—is still available to me. I just have to use my hands.