Through the Eye of a Needle

When the world fell sick and silent just months after my divorce, I picked up a needle. Knitting was almost as foreign to me as injecting myself into oblivion, but so was being single at 45 and facing a pandemic alone.

In true midlife crisis fashion, my partner of almost two decades became someone else, or her true self, depending upon one's perspective. While I cherished our stability, my partner felt suffocated. The nurturing nature of our relationship helped my partner grow into a version of herself that she could finally love, she admitted during our brief, excruciating period of couples' counseling. But her new and improved self was no longer interested in old commitments.

"I've settled for stability and companionship for years. Yes, we loved each other and still do. We built a comfortable, peaceful life together. But there is too much missing and I just can't do it anymore," my ex shared on Tumblr. Within a month or so of separation, she began a new relationship.

It used to be when the philandering husband abandoned his family to run off with his much younger secretary, the wife was the sympathetic figure and the man who strayed was the villain. The modern woman has turned that narrative on its head. Now the passion seekers are celebrated as they escape the stifling cage of domesticity, while the fallout faced by those left behind is rarely taken into consideration. Even in couples' counseling, the therapist began the hopeless attempt at reconciliation based upon where my straying partner had moved the goalposts of our marriage.

The unexpected end of my relationship meant the severing of my only intimate human bond in this world. Socializing drains my hardcore introvert energy. Lively Slack chats with my coworkers satisfies most of my daily social interaction needs. What I desire in my personal life is the unique bond formed from a one-on-one connection, to be a party of two to take on the rest of the world.

While my boss wrote in my annual review that the team looks for my "leadership and insights when the world is burning down," I could elicit no such wisdom from myself when my own universe imploded. Before embracing the fabric arts, I do a crash course in emotional healing. The pressure to triumph over trauma is relentless. Everyone is eager to share the book, the Twitter thread, or the TED Talks that transformed them from broken-hearted to kicking ass. I feel like I've been drafted onto a recovery relay team, and if I'm not ready for the handoff, I'll be responsible for the loss of Team Empowered Women.

A brief period of individual therapy offers compassion and empathy that I'm not in a place to receive. I turn to the teachings of vulnerability guru Brené Brown and try to lean into my discomfort. I seek inspiration in poet Maggie Smith's book, “Keep Moving,” which she began writing as her own marriage was ending. The mantra of embracing change may be good advice, but feels cultish to me, where instead of sipping on poisoned punch to achieve enlightenment I'm pressured to accept that the failure of my marriage is some kind of gift.

I find it difficult to express gratitude for something I never wanted. I'm not inclined to think a disease is a blessing in disguise or the death of a loved one is God working in mysterious ways so how could I imagine divorce to be a golden opportunity for self-improvement? While the orators of optimism seem confident that such soul-crushing periods lead to better outcomes, I remain much less certain.

In the spirit of moving on, I reluctantly join a variety of Meetup groups and attend events designed for lonely introverts to awkwardly socialize together: a queer book club, a writing group, a lesbian knitting circle. Despite my scorn of the swiping culture, I sign up for dating apps, but find the catfishing and ghosting tiresome. Then the pandemic strikes and the hesitant social threads I have loosely strung together fray and fall apart. Stuck at home, I need a hobby to keep my hands from reaching too often for the wine glass.

The Sapphic sewers reignite my lifelong interest in crafts. I find the wood spool with four nails that belonged to my mother and produce yards of I-cord (knitter Elizabeth Zimmermann's more polite term for "idiot cord.") Though I never considered myself as the Martha Stewart type, I fashion seasonal wreaths for the front door from colorful I-cord strands wrapped around Styrofoam. I receive several compliments for using stray strands of I-cord as mask holders, making a modest contribution to pandemic fashion trends.

Ready for a new challenge, I buy a knitting loom and immerse myself in the soothing language of its basic stitches: stockinette, ribbing, purling. I learn to cast on and bind off and how to use anchor yarn. I churn out hats and scarves that I might wear only a week or two during Atlanta's mild winter season, but they look pretty enough hanging in my closet. Now is not the time for practicality. I feel a call to create, to hold within my hands the power to spin and stitch and weave and wrap, to prove to myself that I can still make something useful, even beautiful, while the embers of my old life smolder.

As the pandemic worsens and my isolation grows, I discover the fascinating world of punch needle.

"People have told me that rug hooking has changed their lives … I’ve watched slow and patient punching bring calm, and witnessed aggressive punching dissipate intense anger and frustration," Amy Oxford, the leading expert on the punch needle technique, waxes poetically in an interview. It sounds like the ideal hobby for a bitter, lonely divorcée holed up with her grumpy old cat and anxious rescue dog while the world convulses in an extended crisis mode.

Punch needle and rug hooking both emerged in the 1800s and were long considered a lowly art form until making a comeback over the past few decades. In traditional rug hooking, one uses a short hook tool to pull loops up from the back of the material. Punch needle requires one to work from the backside of the monk's cloth, using a tool with a sharp steel point threaded with yarn that pushes loops down into the material. No complicated stitch patterns or knots are used; punch needle relies upon the tension created by the tightly packed loops to keep it from unraveling. The strong bond created by consistency is integral to this fabric art form.

One must dig deep, pushing the needle all the way through the cloth to the handle. Piercing the virgin monk's cloth to create a hole that will hold a loop feels almost taboo, but I learn that to create, you must first destroy. The result is satisfying and cathartic. Feel like a failure. Punch. Hate my ex for destroying our family. Punch, punch. Wonder if I'll ever be loved again. Punch. Doubt it. Punch, punch, punch.

Looping my way across the cloth forces me to concentrate on something other than the gnawing voice in the back of my head, the one that has been whispering to me since kindergarten that I'm a loser and ugly and a freak unworthy of being loved. I've been battling imposter syndrome most of my life; there's nothing like the failure of a relationship to suggest your self-hatred may have a valid point.

It is devastating to learn that the life I cherished was in many ways a big lie. I spent the last 17 years convinced I was a good, loving partner in a committed relationship, until my partner revealed the fiction of our happiness. Does that mean I’m also a fraud?

Watching Oxford's instructional YouTube videos, where she uses the namesake tool she created, is like watching a Bob Ross painting video or other soothing ASMR material. Amy never chastises students for making a mistake; she offers gentle correction. She cautions users to avoid holidays, which are the spaces created when loops are placed too far apart. Punch needle is quite forgiving of errors, with a gentle tug of the yarn and rubbing over the errant spot with a finger returning the cloth to its original form. If only it were so simple in real life to correct mistakes.

"In a world that doesn’t always make sense, there's something satisfying about being able to pull thousands of loops together, combining them in a way that doesn’t exactly create order, but creates a certain gratifying peace of mind," wise Amy says.

I complete the Oxford Company's Pear Project kit. The starter pattern features a plump, beige fruit shape complemented by a royal purple background. The framed piece hangs in my kitchen. I'm not that fond of pears, but I later learn that in some cultures, the pear symbolizes the human heart.

From puzzles to writing, I've always been drawn to pastimes where the goal is to connect, to join, to make a whole out of parts, to make sense out of a jumbled mess. I never expected my own life to need such salvaging. The months of pandemic-enforced solitude following my divorce seem torturous at first, but never underestimate the power of a skein of yarn to change one's perspective. Stitch after stitch, trusting the needle to guide me, I grow in confidence each day that the power to create is the greatest healer of all.