Weaving in The Loose Ends: Crochet for Resilience and Reflection During COVID-19
In my humble opinion, the college experience is best lived when students are free to question themselves; their beliefs, goals, relationships, and self perception. When I first started my freshman year at Champlain College, I enthusiastically welcomed this exploratory phase of my life. I wanted to learn new things about the world around me and make meaningful changes in my life. However, the reality of college life, and its looming obstacles, hit me hard and unexpectedly, and my freshman year turned into something that needed to be endured rather than savored. The clean break that my sophomore year provided me was a breath of fresh air, and I finally felt that I had the freedom to be an authentic version of myself. For a brief moment, everything felt like it was falling into place, like it was meant to be: it was a very brief moment.
After everyone retreated to their homes during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was as if the wool had been collectively pulled from everyone’s eyes. The typical routines that the world lived by were gone in a split second and replaced with a sense of faux normalcy, a mechanical process of going through the motions. Like so many others during this time, I struggled with feelings of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and fear. During the pandemic, 25% of young adults experienced symptoms of depression and 40.4% experienced increased anxiety symptoms; another 82.7% of college students also reported a loss of meaningful social connection during a life stage where meaningful connection is priceless. These feelings, which I shared with so many others, forced me to reorient my priorities, and myself, to an extent that I had never undergone before.
While we were living through unprecedented global circumstances, I began teaching myself how to crochet. The use of creative outlets to artistically express myself has been an invaluable tool for me growing up, and something that I was always encouraged to lean into. Making art, of any form, is a uniquely calming and exciting method of self care. When I started to learn how to crochet, I felt intimidated by the thought of making mistakes, but the immense pride I felt once my confidence grew outshined all of my hesitations. Being able to physically make things made me feel happy, grateful, creative, all of the emotions I grappled with during the pandemic. In a sense, I found a way to reflect my emotional wellbeing into the fibers of my projects, and it made them feel more real.
During my phase of artistic exploration, I realized how much I had been leaning on the people in my life to support me and how much of myself I had given to them. I wanted to honor my support circles and the wealth of care they have shown me, in the same way that I had honored my own emotions in my crochet. I set out to crochet a patchwork blanket that was my own personal spin on the more traditional mood blanket. Instead of recording and representing my own daily mood, I asked the people in my life to share part of their day with me. Each square represents a different day and each color is symbolic of an emotional category. The finished blanket, compiled of eight weeks of daily moods, is a collage of the people who exist around me and have added meaning to my life in some way. As I inquired after the moods of my friends and family, it became easier to recognize and celebrate them in myself.
I am used to questioning myself, I welcome it even, but during the pandemic there were suddenly too many questions to ponder, never mind answer. All of these questions felt suffocating, but I’ve always thought I expressed myself better in writing. “Weaving in the Loose Ends,” is a collection of short memoirs that capture a handful of the questions that crossed my mind during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each chapter describes my inner monologue, of sorts, surrounding a specific theme — anxiety, friendship, and grief, to name a few — and how crochet gave me a safe outlet to reflect inwards and express myself outwards. In my writing, I consider the impact of the pandemic on my own self perception, and how that shift intrinsically altered my expectations of what I wanted from life. My faults no longer felt as fatalistic and my successes were now a cause for celebration, and this was a shift that I had started to believe wasn’t possible for me.
As I wrote in the collection introduction, “My journey into crochet mirrors my journey into myself: critical and authentic.” During the pandemic, authenticity felt like the furthest thing from my grasp. I was convinced that everyone was pretending all of the time; pretending to work, pretending to be normal, pretending to be okay. Throughout this project, I welcomed my curiosity, but I also welcomed my ability to exist authentically. Ultimately, I would hope that my project could inspire the same in others, in whatever way authenticity manifests in them.
If you are interested in reading the completed collection, please feel free to contact me at keira.hawkes@mymail.champlain.edu!
References
1. Hawes, M.T., Szency, A.K., Klein, D.N., Hajcak, G., & Nelson, B.D. (2021). Increases in depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescents and young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychological Medicine, pp. 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291720005358
2. Sirrine, E.H., Kliner, O., & Gollery, T.J. (2021). College Student Experiences of Grief and Loss Amid the COVID-19 Global Pandemic. OMEGA Journal of Death and Dying, 0(0), pp. 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00302228211027461
3. Weissbourd, R., Batanova, M., Lovison, V., & Torres, E. (2021). Loneliness in America. Making Caring Common Project. Retrieved from https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b7c56e255b02c683659fe43/t/6021776bdd04957c4557c212/1612805995893/Loneliness+in+America+2021_02_08_FINAL.pdf
