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How to Spin a Yarn

'Threading the needle' means balancing life as a writer and a bipolar woman.

By Call Me LesPublished 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago 7 min read
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How to Spin a Yarn
Photo by Artem Kovalev on Unsplash

When it comes to unwinding from the daily routine, my creative projects have always been as eclectic as my personalities. An odd quirk of being a writer is that I often feel my characters live on in my mind, resurfacing every once in a while, like whales coming up for air, to remind me they still have stories left to be told.

As my sign-off always includes, I live a quiet life with my three cats in a tiny apartment. But even on my good days, I struggle with too many words and ideas in my head. They often consume me night and day. I'm sure many authors can relate; most of the time, it feels like if I don't write them down, the words will rattle around endlessly until I go mad. Unless—considering I have bipolar disorder—maybe I am already.

I do my best to manage my condition. I take my meds, and practice therapy techniques learned in CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy), but it can be hard to focus on the present and find moments of inner peace.

Threading the needle to me, means a constant practice of mindfulness and attention to my triggers and ups and downs. The hardest thing to face has been the uncertainty of trusting myself; unless you've been in my shoes, it's impossible to know what it feels like to wonder whether your thoughts, feelings and actions are sane or not.

However, despite the hardships and sacrifices required to live a mentally healthy life, I wouldn't wish to be any different. Being bipolar lets my mind fly. My sources of inspiration and drive to create are fathomless and it's been that way for as long as I can remember.

Before I had writing, I had art & crafts.

As a child growing up in the '90s in Southern Ontario, Canada, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to dabble in arts and crafts as much as I liked outside of school. My parents were very supportive of my artistic abilities; art runs in our family. For example, my great-grandmother's hand-woven rug ended up in a museum! So, when I wanted to paint, I was given paint. When I wanted to make friendship bracelets, I was given embroidery thread. When I wanted to make a bat-house—well, to be fair, I did use my babysitting money to buy those supplies.

You get the idea.

None of my skills ever developed beyond the beginner's stage, and I never got attached to any particular craft for long. Some might say, "What a waste! All that availability, and she never bothered to master anything!"

I disagree.

Keep On Stichin'

Being bold enough to try everything I could get my hands on led me to experience a much broader range of skills, often in unusual settings, such as learning how to knit at age ten in my doctor's office.

After becoming obsessed with the idea of all things 1800s-domestic, thanks to Little House on the Prairie, I decided it was essential that I learn how to knit a blanket. My poor mother can't knit to save her life, so she outsourced my education to a friend, and while waiting for my little brother to have his throat swabbed for strep—yet again—the office receptionist taught me to cast, knit and purl. Sure, I started a blanket with 25 stitches and ended with 7, but my dolls never complained! Like any other guy, Ken was probably used to going without his fair share of the covers at night.

Learning to knit wherever I could. Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels

Muppets Are For Amateurs

Branching out across mediums meant that when I wanted to make a toy that looked like the Velveteen Rabbit, I was confident enough to simply round up some materials George's Marvelous Medicine-style and give it my best. A needle and thread pirated from my mom's sewing basket, a couple of buttons surreptitiously clipped from a discarded blouse, and a pair of my dad's new socks were all I needed to get to work.

Unfortunately, my lack of sewing prowess resulted in a rather lopsided and seriously peculiar puppet (instead of manipulating the movement with the body and mouth, you had to insert your hands into the ears) whose only resemblance to the actual rabbit of legend lay in the shoddy workmanship and copious amount of love heaped upon it. Still, you have to give me credit for the ingenious use of everyday items.

Love is all you need. Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

If I Build It Stellaluna Will Come

As for that bat-house, except for decorations at Halloween, there wasn't a bat to be seen within a kilometre of my newly developed neighbourhood, but it didn't stop me from building it anyway. I was fully convinced that if I built it, Stellaluna would come (or Shade from Silverwing; I wasn't picky).

I hammered nails and chiselled footholds, measured and trimmed and then re-measured and re-trimmed the wood, eventually force-fitting the pieces together into something that resembled a thrown together shack instead of the sleek, well-designed bat-house I'd imagined. I hung it with pride, but, in case you are wondering, no, neither Stellaluna nor Shade nor any non-fiction bats ever did call it home.

If I build it, they will come! Photo by luizclas from Pexels

But I've 'Fair-Isled' myself a fair way from where I started. Let's end the row and go back to the beginning.

Mindful Making Is What YOU Make of It

The connecting thread through my entire creative journey has always been literature; my manic inspirations to create invariably stemmed from something I'd read.

And read did I ever.

My mom may not have been good at knitting, but she sure could check out a library book! All through my earliest childhood, she maxed out the 30 books per week limit from our local library, filling our home with everything from Seuss to Carroll, toting them 'There and Back Again,' on foot, in all weather, like a trustworthy little hobbit. (Perhaps I should mention she's barely 5' tall).

As for the contents of our rotating collection, I started with the Home Hardware Catalogue as an infant, obsessing over it to the point my parents had to beg our local store for a back-issued copy when we wore it out. Over the years, I progressed through all the usual '90s favs, as well as everything else I could get my hands on: The Lorax, Trumpet of the Swan, Brian's Winter, Silverwing, A Girl Named Disaster, and all things Kit Pearson, eventually graduating to Garth Nix's Sabriel and Cheryl Jordan's Raging Quiet. But, of course, the stories I liked best were home-grown, such as those about my peashooter-toting great-grandmother, "Jen."

Here's the part that took me a long time to admire about myself:

In between all that reading, and those failed crafting attempts (trust me, there are many more), I was jotting down bits and pieces of my own stories. It never occured to me I could grow up to be a writer, nor that anyone would like to read them. Without intending to, I gradually progressed into the writer I am today. My creating has evolved from making things inspired from stories, to creating the stories themselves. Publicly, I've started small. My first book, Owl in a Towel, has finally left the nest.

And, of course, I have Vocal. Vocal and its community has given me the courage to take flight. Writing short fictions and other "tiny win" creations, seeing the feedback they generate from my peers, and the emotions they evoke, has been the wind under my wings I never knew I was missing.

That's the thing about creating, the more you try new things, the more you learn about who you are. It doesn't matter how you skillful you are.

I may not be able to knit you a blanket wide enough to keep you warm or embroider a tapestry worthy of displaying, but I am a heck of a storyteller. And best of all, if you team up with me on a crafting project, I'll happily spin you a good yarn while we work.

No promises on the crafting results ;)

~~~

About the author: Lesley Leatherdale

Fiction is my hobby. Interviewing is my passion.

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Cheers, folks!

And remember, it's always "better to be happy than dignified." - Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)

Free stock photos courtesy of pexels.com

bipolar
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About the Creator

Call Me Les

Aspiring etymologist and hopeless addict of childrens' fiction.

If I can't liberally overuse adverbs and alliteration, I'm out!

Instagram @writelesplaymore

~&~

No words left unspoken

She/Her

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Comments (2)

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  • Dharrsheena Raja Segarran2 years ago

    I've only heard about CBT as I'm undergoing that but I just got to know about DBT

  • Lena Folkert2 years ago

    I live this piece. So. Much.

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