April 1: Hump day. There’s lots of talk about how days are blurring into one right now.
April 2: This one’s about making connections in my writing.
April 3: A birthday – 44 today. A strange, too-normal sort of day.
April 4: I’m working on some writing for my literature review about making and ‘bringing into being’ – we can think about these three things (process, maker and material) as the three key parts of the making process.
April 5: A buttoned-up, difficult day.
April 6: A double-plus-ungood day, in which my mind felt like a serpent’s nest, hissing away. It calmed briefly but the snakes reared up again later.
April 7: Today’s entry is a plan for a box, into which one can shut oneself away from all the armchair experts and the busybodies, whose opinions seem to be proliferating at alarming speed.
April 8: Many people have put pictures of rainbows in their windows as a gesture of support for the NHS, so here’s ours, in the kitchen window.
April 9: A particularly troubled day. I’ve spent more of this week in tears than is strictly necessary, and on looking up symptoms on the NHS website I noted that I seem to tick all the boxes for depression. I’m not sure I *am* depressed, though, or rather, if I am, there’s not a lot that can be done about it by anyone else right now. I decided on a temporary solution to make life quieter and more peaceful. (The entry says ‘how to fix a troubled mind?’)
April 10: An enforced day of rest due to eyestrain.
April 11: Adjusting the signal-to-noise ratio – quelling the noise by reducing my social media use. I don’t know how long I can manage this for, but I’m hoping it’ll also reduce both the dread impostor syndrome that seems to plague me, and a sense that I keep handing others sticks with which to beat me (metaphorically speaking, obviously).
April 12: Easter Sunday. A particularly quiet day, sandwiched as it is between two bank holidays. Nobody to visit, no alarms, no surprises. A not-unpleasant sense of equilibrium, of folding in and resting up.
April 13: Speaking of which… today marks the final entry in the stitch journal, for no other reason than that the fabric is now full, and it’s already unwieldy enough without adding more fabric. I’m finishing with the same red thread that started the journal just over two years ago – the thread that is supposed to act as a guide in navigating a thesis. I’m also offering up William Stafford’s poem ‘The Way It Is’ as it seems more relevant than ever, for me at least:
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
The full stitch journal is here:
Clare Daněk 