Three Skills I Learned in 2021
And what I REALLY learned from them.
And the Life Lessons They Taught Me
The Skill: How to Make My Own Sewing Patterns
The Lesson: Give Myself The Space to Try and Try Again
The biggest thing I spent time on this year was sewing. I bought a sewing machine in February and started to re-teach myself skills I had learned during a time of extreme trauma. More than just wanting to sew, I wanted to be able to use the clothing that I made, so all of the pieces I wear in my everyday wardrobe. This took me on a variety of adventures where I created a corset based on a pattern in a book. Then, I made a pattern for my own set of fully-boned stays. Eventually, I learned to start creating my own patterns for other items of clothing and altering blocks I created using a variety of sources. I learned skills from historical pattern drafting manuals because I just love those crazy Victorians and YouTube — teacher of all skills (if you can sit through an ad for SkillShare).
This also gave me a lot of time to reflect on my own fashion sense. For a long time, I would have denied having any, but anyone that knows me can definitely comment on my eclectic style. I think I didn’t want to admit how much I invest in expressing myself through clothing due to my own thoughts on whether or not such expressions are ‘shallow,’ and while I was sewing, boning, and ripping out stitches, it gave me a lot of time to think about just how much goes into this art form. It also gave me a lot of time to consider where my feelings about the vanity of clothing came from, and it came directly from abusive Evangelicals. I realized how much interest in fashion and clothing has been disparaged, which is a pity. Spending a lot of time creating the clothes I wanted to wear so that I would finally feel that I was bringing part of myself into my wardrobe helped me learn how much clothing adds to my life. It was as if learning to put these pattern shapes together, what a princess seam was, etc. — was teaching me something fundamental I’d somehow missed about an art form I’ve loved for decades.
Before I did any of this, the idea of drafting my own sewing patterns, or that I could use essentially free resources to teach myself these skills, wouldn’t have been something I thought I could do. Every time I sat down to draft a new pattern, I thought “this is too big for me, it’s too complicated, I don’t understand it.” When I gave myself the space and grace to fumble through it until I could wrap my head around it — drafting patterns became my favorite part of the sewing process to do. Once I allowed that love and passion for the process to take over, I drew patterns and ideas that I can use in knitting and my other fiber skills.
It also made me 100% more annoying to watch films with, since now I comment endlessly on the costumes, too.
The Skill: Writing Beyond My Comfort Zone.
The Life Lesson: Finding my why is hard, but starting the journey has made things clearer.
Earlier this year, I shared a story about my eye. Later, I wrote a story about how one of my PTSD responses is to abandon the world when I feel abandoned. People’s response to those pieces made me feel very powerful and inspired — and it helped reaffirm how important connection is, even for an introvert. I also got some troublesome responses and in some cases the exact ones I had always been afraid of!
And still, I write?
It can be really weird in my brain — and there are times where I can easily convince myself that I can just sink away from the world and it doesn’t matter. But ultimately, it does. There’s a lot of beauty and wonder out there in the world, and to be able to recognize it means being able to connect — even if that connection comes with a risk.
Those pieces and conversations around them lead me to think about my ‘why’ — why I write. And at the core of it all, for me, is — how can I help? Once I started to realize that part of my ‘why’ is to help people understand the arcane and seemingly inscrutable, a lot of things fell into place, and I understand a lot more about where I want to head with my writing in 2022.
The Skill: Self-Promotion
Life Lesson: It was easier for me to learn to promote myself once it meant lifting others up.
When I started the year, I was at a job that made me miserable. Ultimately I quit that job because they sucked at patient privacy and were a terrible, toxic work environment.
The entire experience made me realize that like it or not, it was time for me to actually embark on a career in writing. The career I always wanted. The career that I always said, “I would have been a writer if I had the time to do x.” Part of the reason I had been hesitant for so long was, honestly, I was afraid of pitching or anything that even slightly smacked of self-promotion.
I know that’s dumb. I know.
I also know what it stems from, and it’s that terrible upbringing of mine. It came complete with teachings that ‘any sort of feeling of pride you have is a shame in God’s eyes and will inevitably lead to failure, doom, despair, and being eaten by dogs.’ It’s like “pride goes before a fall” had a bigger, meaner brother. It’s a particularly difficult thing for me to work through. A part of me has this incredibly warped personality dysphoria, so it’s as if my skills reside in that blind spot.
So, it’s weird to list this skill because I’m still sort of afraid of pitching and self-promotion and kind of bad at it. But, what I’m great at doing is getting excited about what brilliant things people are working on, and talking about them. I’m happy to talk about their work because it excites me. It’s yet another reason that understanding why I want to write has helped me so much by helping me to understand more about what I want to write about, and how I want to accomplish it.