May

So, I'm not going to lie to you, May has been brutal. This post is, unusually for me, mostly not sewing, and the first two paragraphs are about the recent events here in the UK, just to warn you.


I live in the suburbs of Manchester, which of course has been in the news this week for the absolute worst of reasons. I wasn't directly affected by the bombing at all -- didn't know anyone at the concert, haven't been to that venue for years, don't live or spend time in any of the areas where there has been subsequent police action. It's profoundly shocking that such a terrible thing happened anywhere at all -- it shouldn't be worse just because it happened in my home town or in a place and event of a type that I know intimately. Somehow it is, though. I find myself asking how someone capable of such a callous act could co-exist with me: walk through the same streets as me; go to places -- like the university the bomber attended -- that I am familiar with and that I thought I understood. I've been to so many music events, been a part of the normal aftermath of a show so many times. I've been that teenager in the centre of Manchester at the end of a pop concert, shrieking and clutching at my friends, ears still ringing from the sound system. I keep thinking of all those little girls coming out of the Arena, how elated and joyful they would have been at that moment after seeing their favourite performer live. It is unimaginable to me that someone could move through that crowd of happy children and go through with this act.

The only thing that has comforted me the last few days is reminding myself that it was, it seems, a tiny number of people that planned this and just one man who enacted it. By contrast, literally hundreds of people immediately responded by trying to help the victims, help people caught up in the chaos, help each other make sense of what was happening. They did that for no better reason than that they were there, things were happening, and that seemed like the right thing to do. Thousands more rushed the next day to do small things -- offer to give blood, donate money, leave flowers and attend vigils to mourn strangers. In the end, in my city, like most places, the people whose innate behaviour was to try to do good, helpful and kind things vastly outnumber people who commit terrible acts.

Other than the shock and horror of the last few days, the rest of May has been brutal mainly because of my health situation. On the one hand, the news is actually terrifically good: my new medication is definitely working, and the medium and long-term future is much brighter for me as a result. On the other hand, the short-term experience is grim. The withdrawal from my previous medication is absolutely grueling, much worse than I anticipated. Not only are individual days really hard, but the cumulative effect of so many weeks of withdrawal is that I feel like a wrung-out dishcloth.

As a result, most of May has involved me gradually stopping doing things that I just can't keep up at the moment. I dropped pretty much all my hobbies and even my social media interaction, even the things that I usually more active on like Insta and Twitter. I did next to nothing crafty -- I cut out a t-shirt early in the month but I can't seem to summon up the energy to rethread my overlocker or work on it so it's still in pieces. I didn't knit this month, or start my new cross-stitch kit or really do anything else at all. I didn't even really read or pay that much attention to my sewing magazines this month. Pretty much I am on hiatus from, well, everything.

The good thing is, this is all temporary. I have adjusted my expectations of what I'm going to sew this summer down to "nothing, or maybe one or two items if I am lucky". I'm hoping that I'll start to feel better in time to think about sewing for the autumn.