Becoming

As ever, January is turning out to be 4,305 days long. The weather is Baltic and the ground is treacherous in every sense of the word. There are good things. The boat is toasty warm and despite the gas bottle running out half an hour before dinner was ready this evening, remains a haven of safety and a home in which I take deep pleasure.

The heating is fuelled by diesel, so the only casualties of the gas bottle situation were that my roast potatoes were not crisp and I had to finish the chicken in the microwave. I was unable to change the gas bottle in the dark, on my own, having never done it before and it being situated in a small, dark space and requiring extra hands and concentration. Also a tool that is somewhere very, very safe and which I would not know where to start looking for it. My neighbours, who are lovely and very obliging, were all out and Jason is away so it will keep until morning, when a nice man called Dylan who responded to my SOS call via the marina email is going to show me what to do.

I am feeling rather overwhelmed today. The gas running out was, as most things turn out to be at the moment, deeply symbolic. There are a lot of things going on that are currently affecting my life and which I have zero control over. I am usually pretty successful at a combination of putting things down and stepping away. At the moment they are rather loud and insistent, which I am finding harder to manage.

I am in the last week of my ‘double maths’ approach to therapy, which is a very good thing indeed. It has all been super helpful and surprisingly compatible but it has been a lot to contend with. I have learned some really valuable things and am beginning to apply some of those things to positive effect. I’d say I’ve made the most out of every moment of therapy that has been offered and I’m not sorry that I did it, but it is really bloody hard work and today I am really feeling it.

Thoughts and feelings have been coming thick and fast in the last week, mostly as I have been making the doll of me that I rescued from the back of the cupboard. Normally I like to write my way into making sense of my thoughts and then do something about them. Since I started making the doll, it has been a very different experience. As I am making, thoughts spring up in a different, more immediate way. I find that the activity of my hands in the process of making are not just making a physical version of me, they are helping connect to and make sense of some of the emotional and cerebral parts of me. I seem to be literally and metaphorically making myself. There are times as I have been working that I caught myself thinking ‘I’ve done this before.’ I can’t pin down when or what that means exactly, but it seems true enough to warrant writing it down here. It makes me feel like Wendy stitching Peter Pan’s shadow back onto his foot.

I bought the rag doll so that I had a way of skipping over the gnarly issue of the fact that I wanted to make a doll but didn’t know how to make a doll and was using it as an excuse not to start. I started covering her with patches of cloth from a pair of favourite pyjama bottoms that had become too threadbare for me to keep repairing but which I didn’t want to throw out. As I sat, stitching her new skin on, I thought about the fact that even though I had bought the existing doll for purely practical reasons, it was pretty symbolic that I was taking a societally acceptable version of commodified femininity and covering her up with my pyjamas.

I chose the pyjama material because I wanted to save them and they were no longer useful in their pyjama form. Also, it was free material that was immediately available. When I was stitching it, I thought about the fact that pyjamas are, for me, about being comfortable and relaxed, about safety and warmth. They are clothes for privacy, not for outward show. They are also, in my own life, symbolic of the significant amount of time I have spent being unwell. There are layers and layers to this process that as I discover them, feel so right.

It also occurred to me that unlike in other areas of my life where I find it very stressful to not know how to do something, to the point where I cry with rage and frustration, I didn’t feel that way at all when I thought about making the doll. I just turned the problem round and looked at it from different angles until I found a way of doing it that worked for me. I have allowed myself to be curious about what is possible for me. I have also allowed myself to be ok with results that are less than perfect. I am more than ok with the process. I am actively happy to be doing it.

I found myself thinking that I can do it like this because I am not trying to be a doll maker. I am making a doll that is me. Whatever I am happy with is good, because it means that I am happy with myself and I am happy making myself. That feels quite liberating and powerful.

I have begun to think about how if I can behave like this in one scenario, I can definitely find ways to do it in others. I don’t know how yet, but I am fairly confident I will figure it out eventually.

I went to visit my parents at the weekend and I took the doll with me. When I was a child, my mum, along with being super talented at virtually everything you can think of, also used to make the most amazing rag dolls. She was a real doll maker, not a make do and mender like me. I always felt sad that the dolls my mum made went to other little girls and not me. I was not short of toys and my auntie had made me several rag dolls of my own, by the way. In hindsight, I think it was probably the connection with my mum that I craved more than the doll although I’d have told you a different story all those years ago.

This weekend I was able to take my project to her and we figured out some of the things I wanted to do and make together, side by side. It felt like a blessing and a healing of something so buried in the past that I had forgotten it was even torn until I unearthed it by accident as I was stitching. On the day I was leaving, I came downstairs to find my mum had dug out the patchwork quilt she has been making forever. She offered me a few scraps from clothes I had as a child that she had incorporated into the quilt. I have stitched them into the dress I have made the doll of me as pockets and patches. Bits of little me to go with the me I am making, saved by my mum and leftover from her making. It is sweet and simple and profoundly powerful.

I didn’t know how to make a dress, but I made one. As well as the pockets and patches, it is made from the remnants of a cloth bag from the Royal Shakespeare Company, covered with quotations from Shakespeare’s plays. I wanted fabric made of meaningful words that have shaped and explained and changed my life profoundly for the better. It’s not the most beautiful of dresses, but it is right and true and important.

And it has pockets. Of course. Highly seditious pockets.

The doll of me is still becoming. There’s more to make. There will probably always be more, because I am always becoming, but I have already given myself the gift of starting to become myself and even when I don’t know how to proceed I appear to be able to keep becoming myself anyway. I am learning in the most profound and hands on way to trust the process and enjoy it as it happens. It’s quite literally spellbinding.