WIP - kilt
It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here. Thought I’d maybe use the excuse of posting these photos of me wearing a WIP patchwork quilt somewhere other than social media to just muse about life as a WIP (original I know).
At the start of the year I had a real plan for posting on this website. Fungi of the month! Videos, blog posts, a schedule. Plans for so many other things.But of course as always happens I managed a few months before (for a multitude of reasons) it all fell off.
Those multitude of reasons being that:
a) I have ADHD and am always flitting from thing to thing, as I have done my whole life, and find it hard to do anything consistently without external support (or payment, a job tends to have both).
b) it’s been a very dry year I started this at the very end of fungi season, and haven’t seen much fungi this year partly cause I’ve been a bit here there and everywhere, and partly because there aren’t an abundance of fruit bodies.
c) I am at the end of several years of chaos. Leaving unhealthy jobs, breakups, shifts in communities, uninhabitable living situations, evictions, living with parents again as a fully fledged adult, continuously learning how to live with my disabled body with flare ups and crashes. It’s been a very weird few years, an incredibly unsettled few years. Now I’ve moved in by myself for the first time (a huge transition that is weird to adjust to) and I’m renovating the flat (so many little bits to do). I don’t trust this place yet, and though I am so grateful for a chance to slow and a semblence of permanence I am far from settled. I am choosing to believe that will come with time, and trying not to force anything. So for now, I am letting a routine slowly find me as I slowly find myself again.
I guess what I’m saying is that this space (as much as I once again tried to force myself into consistency despite the fact I and my life has never been consistent) will continue to ebb and flow and be a bit chaotic and inconsistent. And I’m trying to make peace with that, with myself. Multidisciplinary, multifaceted, and living in a system that burns me out again and again and again.
It’s so hard to find the time and the peace and the rest to have a consistent upload schedule. This is probably the 20th time in my life I’ve tried (as this blogging thing has been a part of my life for 12 years now) and I’ve never managed it. It feels like a kind of failure that I can’t do it but is it? The moment I have a bit of a break the ideas flow, I write, i edit, i draw and paint. But then work takes over again and I spend my free time recovering, with little energy for bigger creative things.
I do this, any creative thing, for the love of it, for the need of it. And it’s not love if I’m forcing myself to do something when my body is asking for something else. I ebb and flow as the day does, as the season does, as the whole universe does. It’s natural, it’s ok. I will try my hardest not to punish myself for existing this way.
Onto the WIP in the photos. This is a kilt I bought in a charity shop in Glasgow last year. A great find for £20 it’s pretty sturdy! It’s my first kilt and I’m a big fan, a skirt that feels masculine? Cue gender euphoria, and a connection to a family history I know little about. But its shiny polyester yellow, green and white panels didn’t really fit my vibe or current wardrobe, and I had lots of material unused by my Nan and passed on to me. I also have lots of long meetings in work that are easier to concentrate on with my hands busy stitching.
I started stitching it somewhere back in the cold and dark of November and promptly forgot about it. As I knew I’d be back in Scotland in June I took it with me, unfinished. It has prompted me to start it again. Maybe It’ll be finished by the end of the year, maybe something else will distract me. I’m trying to learn to accept that even if it takes a while, I’ll get things done. Plus, if the pressure is off I have so much more space to create.
