Am I coping or am I disassociating?
On fiber arts, weeding, anxiety screenings, and keeping my hands very busy in 2025
If you were to ask me whether I am very anxious about the Moment that we’re living in—only six months into what we are still calling a presidency—and its constitutional consequences for our country and its real-life consequences for the people of the world, I wouldn’t hesitate to answer “yes.” I’m so anxious, I would tell you, that I’ve had to limit my news consumption to NPR’s Up First and The Daily each morning. I will still scroll through headlines once every day or two, but have turned off news alerts on my phone. My husband cancelled our subscription to the Sunday edition of The New York Times. Since January, what I get in the way of news alerts mostly comes to me via social media. This means that the news exists in my mind as a carousel of video footage—the abductions of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, the parents handcuffed on the street while their children scream. I often rehearse my plan of action for when I encounter ICE on the streets of my neighborhood—call the mayor, call local news, present myself as an attorney. Last night I had a dream that I passed a truck full of ICE agents on my drive home and debated whether to turn around and follow them.
I was thus a little surprised to learn at my annual physical yesterday that I am not currently experiencing anxiety. According to a screening questionnaire, to which I answered “0-not at all” to all but one question (“How many days in the last two weeks have you been worrying too much about different things?”), I am doing just fine. This was a little surprising because I have long thought of myself as “anxious.” I’ve been taking medication for Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or GAD, since 2020 (shout-out to my life-changing Lexapro) and experienced postpartum anxiety not that long ago. And for all of the reasons I outlined above, I’ve been feeling like I’m living in a swirling dust storm of ambient distress.
But I wasn’t completely surprised, because this swirling dust storm has felt different than those I’ve encountered in the past. I’ve been able to sleep. I’ve been able to compartmentalize. By comparison, when I am really feeling anxious, living in my body feels like living inside of a Theragun. I vibrate at the frequency of my anxious thoughts, and have to do things like lay on the floor with my legs up the wall with a heavy blanket over my abdomen, or sleep on the couch with my dog. This time, it feels like I am in a protective bubble.
Is it the medication? Is it the grounding effects of parenting a toddler, the slowness at which we move through the world to admire a dandelion or a fire truck? Is it my sense of personal safety? Is it the fact that I don’t have a full-time job and for the first time in I don’t know how many years I love how I get to spend my days?
While I know it’s most likely a combination of all of the above, my unprofessional opinion is also inclined to credit the fact that I have been keeping my hands very busy. Crocheting and weeding, it turns out, are good for my nerves.
A few months ago, I decided I needed a new hobby. For twelve years, when people asked me what I liked to do outside of work, I proudly said I loved to write, and read. For twelve years every spare moment went to those activities. But now that writing is my job I was starting to feel a little … one-dimensional. The thing I wanted to do in the evening was the same thing I wanted to do during the day. But one can only spend so many hours of the day looking at a page or a screen….right? Shouldn’t my brain exist in modes other than reading, writing, and parenting a toddler?
The obvious option was to take a ceramics class like every other woman in her mid-thirties. There are more little ceramics studios in my neighborhood than there are bars! I could make my own fancy objects! But I have enough self-awareness to know I lack the kind of artistic ability that allows one to shape beauty with one’s hands. And if I’m being honest, I don’t like being bad at things. I didn’t want to spend the money on a class only to have my house littered with lumpy salt dishes. Also, it was winter and I didn’t really want to a hobby that required me to leave my house in the dark at night.
Revisiting knitting was the obvious choice, especially since I also wanted to break my habits of picking my cuticles and looking at my phone while watching TV. I learned how to knit when I was home sick with strep throat in seventh grade, and while I’ve never completed anything of note, I always enjoy returning to the knitting basket when I’m at my parents house and picking up whatever scarf project I last abandoned. I’m a textile junkie! I am always drawn to $75 baby knits and fingering $475 blankets at local boutiques. And the “fiber arts” are a good match for my level of artistic ability—an eye for color and an ability to follow instructions, but not much else.
I was just about to pick up some knitting needles when I came across these gorgeous colorful balaclavas on Etsy. They were hand-crocheted, comprised of a series of familiar patterned squares that I learned were called “granny squares.” I hesitated whether to buy one, getting it in my head that I could make one of these myself. I had also recently received a gorgeous hand-crocheted baby blanket from my great-aunt who, in her nineties, has crocheted a baby blanket for each of the dozens of grandchildren, grand-nieces, grand-nephews, and now grand-grand-nieces who are her progeny. It contained delicate detail that I couldn’t imagine mastering with knitting details, having spent a decade not moving beyond simple knit and purl stitches. I decided I would embrace a new challenge. I would teach myself how to crochet!
I went into a local yarn store, hoping to buy the cheapest yarn available and a hook. Instead, I was muscled into buying a $50 beginner’s kit by a skilled saleswoman. “You need to have a specific project in mind,” she told me, handing me a box which promised me a tote bag made out of granny squares. “If you can master a granny square, you can do anything,” she said. Flustered, I acquiesced. Maybe I could make one of those balaclavas after all? But after spending several evenings hunched over the hook on the couch, I had failed to even decipher the cryptic code of the crochet pattern in the project’s instruction manual, which was definitely not for beginners. “Ch5 ss” was the first step. Hubris!!
The shame of the $50 sticker on the box of the crochet kit forced me to persevere. I checked out several books on crochet from the library. I watched YouTube tutorials. I bought some $1 balls of yarn at the creative reuse store down the street. And I decided I would start with a pot holder. It took me a couple of months, and many false starts, but eventually, I successfully crocheted a bobble-stitched hot pad with the bargain yarn. I decided I was ready to embark on the granny square bag. And you know what? I figured it out. I have completed ten out of the thirteen squares necessary to complete the bag. I can do one in an evening of television watching on the couch. I can now even do one while watched subtitled Korean reality television. I’m as proud of these squares as I am of the article I published in Slate last month. It feels so good to make something—something I can turn over in my hands and rub between my fingers. Each new stitch is a challenge that, once mastered, becomes automatic and feels satisfying to execute over and over.
The act of crocheting is steadying. It channels my focus into my hands, into tiny movements—chain, yarn over, pull-through two—and becomes a sort of meditation, like praying with rosary beads. I concentrate on the rhythm of the stitch, learning to trust that each tiny incremental loop is creating something larger. It also inspires hope and allows me to feel a little bit in control, which are both great anti-anxiety practices. I can’t control whether the Supreme Court will side with the Trump Administration and repudiate nationwide injunctions, but I can plan out an afghan.
I came to my other new hobby unintentionally. It is my husband who has taken up the mantle of caring for the yard of our new house. He has grown an entire vegetable garden from seed, transferring tomatoes and kale and zucchini seedlings to the raised beds on the south edge of our yard. He has cared for the perennials and planted annuals. Each morning, he disappears for an hour outside to weed and water and stake. I have contributed barely anything to this landscape. “Water until they are soaked” is an instruction that stressed me out, when I was recently called in to nurture this bounty while he traveled for work.
My one offering to our yard? Weeding the paths that wind their way around the garden, and the pavers of the courtyard that sits between our house and our garage instead of a driveway. Keeping this surface area free of weeds is a Sisyphean task. In the time it takes me to weed one side of the house, the weeds have reappeared on the other side. I could weed all day every day. “You know you could spray something,” my handyman told me. I know I could, but with a dog and a toddler I don’t want to spray any toxins. But really, I don’t want to spray because I don’t want to lose the surprisingly delight I find in this endless chore.
Pulling a weed up by the roots gives me a satisfaction that I had only ever experienced popping a pimple. Both tasks are so weirdly pleasurable. They satisfy my desire to pick, my desire to smooth out a surface and remove a blemish. But weeding ….. has no downsides. I am not left with a reddened spot and the shameful evidence of my picking. I am left with a clean surface. Occasionally, however, I’ll fail to get a weed out by the roots. My hand will come up with a fistful of crabgrass, my fingers caked in dirt from grazing against the roots still embedded in the cracks of the pavers. Then, it is like the disappointing realization that you’re dealing with a much angrier cyst than you thought. But for the most part, especially if I move slowly and carefully, I am able to fill a big bucket of weeds in no time at all, the roots all surprising long. I do it while I’m on the phone, I do it while my daughter rides her little plastic vehicles around the patio or plays with her water table. Weeding is its own meditation, like crocheting, a channeling of energy. Just writing this, my hands feel a little twitchy, eager to feel the sensation of roots easily loosening and coming up from the ground.
Gardening is kind of a middle-aged habit. It requires a patience and a diligence that many of us don’t have in our younger years. I certainly didn’t (don’t?). I’ve long tuned out when others talk about gardening. I love
and her dahlias, but I’ve long assumed that an extended planting project is not for me. But maybe I’ll grow into it. Maybe weeding is my entry point. I am finding out for myself what others have long said—that dirt has a magical property. I’m wary of sounding like RFK, who has suggested that Americans need to be sent to work on “wellness farms” to detox from their SSRIs. That is a problematic policy solution for a billion reasons. But there’s no question that getting your hands dirty, feeling the cool of the earth while surrounded by chirping birds is medicinal, an antidote to the news cycle. It changes your relationship to time by connecting you to a different rhythm. Weeds also offer an obvious metaphor about the stubborn persistence of life! These are all things that others have written about more beautifully than I am here, but I’m just here to tell you that you don’t have to have a green thumb! You can just start with weeding. Even if you don’t have a yard, there may be sidewalks or public green spaces near you that you can weed! Like caring for a child or cooking for a family, it’s never-ending maintenance work. The work is never done. But the work is not about the result, but the work itself. The beauty is in your busy hands.I worry sometimes that I am not doing enough, even if I’m not sure what it is I feel I should be doing more of. Making phone calls to legislators? Putting my body on the line? Taking on pro bono immigration cases? Doing anything more than expressing outrage to my husband and close friends? But then I remember that it is not normal that we are able to hold all of the troubles of the world in our hands, that when we go in search of a dopamine hit we end up flipping between images of starving children and crying children and Left on Friday bathing suit ads. I have to care for my nervous system if I am going to have any ability to care for others. With friends last night, we started to discuss whether my ability to lose myself in weeding, or crafts, is a form of disassociation, or just a form of healthy coping. “I think this is what people have always done!” my friend said. I think she’s right. It’s okay that we are able to find glimpses of peace, of joy, amidst sorrow and fear. Look at the resilience of the weeds, popping up through the earth day after day.
You’re making me want to learn how to crochet! My front yard landscape is already a project. Loved this one.
The work of weeding and craft of crocheting is great therapy. Glad you found a way to cope in this tumultuous world.