A week after launching The Year of Proving Myself Wrong, I began working on the second installment of the series. I had intended for the post to be about embroidery, a handicraft I’d long admired and oddly craved. I say "odd," as I never once stitched an image onto cloth.
Embroidery had been a skill closely associated with my family through my paternal Nagymama—grandmother in Hungarian—who relied financially and artistically on embroidery before her marriage and during two World Wars. For my grandmother, embroidery was not only economically beneficial for her and her family but also mentally fortifying. At the age I am now, she had suffered the sudden death of her mother at the age of eight, experienced abandonment at the hands of her father, married my Nagyapu (grandfather), and birthed two children in quick succession. She was the sole parent for these infants while her husband was away at war, and using thread to actualize a pattern she had created in her mind was grounding. During her moments of abject loneliness, I imagine that the punch and pull of the needle through stiffened cloth must have made her feel real.
Nagymama's association with embroidery increased my admiration for it, but the necessity of the stitch was not a surprise to me. During my tenure as a dancer, I sewed ribbons onto dozens of pairs of pointe shoes. The purpose of these stitches was not for beauty, but utility. They were the safeguards that would keep my feet from slipping from their satin confines when I went en pointe—a highly improbable but not impossible threat that always nagged at me from the back of my brain, compelling me to use double strands of dental floss in place of regular thread.
My experience as a dancer and awareness of my grandmother’s life imparted a crucial lesson to me. The act of sewing—for practical or aesthetic purposes—wasn’t just a useful skill, but a ritual for security.
A stitch binds. It connects, tightens. It holds. The stitch is a symbol of desire as well as intention. It is also a symbol of control. The sewer or embroiderer doesn’t pierce the fabric they’re working on without a notion of the direction their project will be heading, nor do they rush the process that will cause this project to be fulfilled. The stitch represents acceptance and commitment—it is a most tangible way of saying: this will remain.
You'll recall I said I had intended for this post to be about embroidery. It is, for the most part. But in February, in the midst of completing this post, I realized it was assuming an entirely different trajectory. I had typed I can’t embroider on my “I Can’t” list—the fuel for this series—but soon realized that this post wasn't going to be only about my journey with embroidery. That it, in fact, never could be and if it was, I was probably doing something wrong. No, this post was going to be about confronting a belief I long housed—that I was unable to create something beautiful.
I was raised in a family that did not offer praise freely. If you presented a card or picture that was subpar—the colors garish, the subject unidentifiable, the greeting or message riddled with spelling errors—these deficits would be communicated immediately. This wasn't meant to demean me, and I can't recall ever feeling destroyed by the critical observations of my loved ones, but it did make me hyper-aware of what was considered "good" or "beautiful" as well as how difficult it was to have those titles attributed to my work.
Whenever I drew or attempted a craft, I found myself faced with repeated disappointment, because what I created never reflected the image I had conceived in my mind. I was suffering from the fallacy that if you're not a pro at something from the start, you should abandon it; but this was not how people saw my dissatisfaction. I was told I was a perfectionist with high standards, a Type A personality—and this reinforcement encouraged me to drop any hobby I didn't immediately excel at. I did this many, many times, and all the while the canyon between me and beauty grew ever wider.
For anyone who has struggled with the immense pressure to people please as a child, you can imagine how vowing to abstain from all potential failure and imperfection can grow into a major problem. What starts as a severe unwillingness to make a mistake or look foolish in relatively low-stake tasks or situations soon evolves into a reluctance to pursue jobs, interests, and relationships—or worse, a need to leave these same things—if one believes an irredeemable blunder has been or will be committed. Things aren't just momentarily uncomfortable or dismal, they are forever ruined. What results is not only a narrow, somewhat cloistered adulthood, but a direct estrangement with beauty, as one believes themselves to be antithetical to this ideal.
Because of this thought process, I didn't have many—if any—hobbies. I admired/envied women who were artistically equipped or took up activities with a devil-may-care attitude, but I always felt too inadequate to approach something unfamiliar in a similar way. I kept myself content with my writing and personal relationships, and for a long time these realms were what "I knew I could do." This was before the summer of 2020 happened.
If you've read my first post, you'll know that the events leading up to this series were heart-rendering. My life did not feel very generative, and I was consumed by self-doubt as well as the sinking feeling that I had failed to successfully execute the fundamental aspects of life. Though I understand how unfair and downright cruel this "logic" was, it didn't keep me from becoming subsumed by it. There wasn't a portion of my life that didn't seem to be suffering and I constantly berated myself because of this fact.
At this time, a line from a poem I wrote as a teen about unrequited love titled "The Wall" kept entering my mind. The poem was about a woman in the throes of insomnia, whose late-night musings transform the bare wall beside her bed into a canvas that displays the outline of a sleeping lover and, eventually, a bucolic landscape. "I wanted to create something of beauty once / but was told I didn't have the tools," she says, gently tracing her finger on the wall. The reference to "tools" was my way of discussing the personal resources one mourns when their ability to make something work and beautiful is incapacitated. This line, and the fact that as an adult woman I finally understood what my late-teen self could only intimate, lambasted me. I definitely didn't feel I had the tools to create anything, let alone something of beauty, and for a long while I deserted myself, retreating into this feeling of lack.
This makes my attempt at embroidery all the more poignant. It seems such a minor act, but in truth it was a venturing. When I purchased a beginner's embroidery kit and some pattern books, it was a reentry into possibility as well as a resuscitation of that spontaneously creative self I had denied so long ago. It was also a retrieval of my personal authority. Every stitch would be made by me, from a pattern of my choosing. I knew what I could expect—and if I didn't get it the first time, I would work until I did.
During my very first attempt at embroidery, I traced and exacted one of the simplest patterns I could find in my pattern book. The moment I completed the pattern, I raised it for a closer look and encountered a feeling of peace and accomplishment. For an embroidery novice, I had done a pretty good job. But this wasn't the only thing that made me smile—the very act of setting out to create something beautiful and have it turn out better that I'd hoped was an extra, unforeseen prize. And there was something else it gave me—something that I believed I'd lost. It gave me a sense of self-recognition. I could detect each stitch and the effort it took for me to make them. It was a finger print in floss. It was a victory.
Pattern taken from Thread Folk: A Modern Makers Book of Embroidery Projects and Artist Collaborations by Libby Moore