I don’t have a great track record for getting attributions right, but I think it’s Tai Chi that has the idea that humans have a finite amount of energy. That if you slow your movements down enough, you extend that energy, and by extension, your life. Please don’t fact-check me. It will ruin my train of thought. The problem is, I can’t really slow my body down any further. I work from home. I sit at my desk all day. I make a genuine effort to never leave the house.
So instead of slowing my body, I simplify everything else.
For example: I visit a relative via the same bus route every single time. I’ll take this bus over any other. I’ll wait for it, even in bad weather. I’ll accept delays. I’ll stand, or squash in with a busy bus, headphones pressed into my ears, because I know exactly where this route goes and how it feels to be on it. Other routes would get me there too. They would just require me to pay attention.
Once you notice I do this with buses, you’ll start noticing the same commitment in other areas too. My laundry would give me away immediately. I own two — sometimes three — of the same items.
This isn’t really a commitment to a style. That’s just a happy bonus. These items work. They fit where I expect them to. The fabric feels right. The pockets are the correct size, which matters more than fashion ever will.
Owning multiple copies means I don’t have to jump and dance through the process of shopping and fitting again any time soon. It’s an elimination of future problems. A small act of foresight that saves me from reinventing the wheel under bad lighting. That’s the whole point.
And if you’re paying attention to my style, you’ll spot another small secret. There are almost always three bangles on my left wrist. They come in a variety of colours, but they’re all the same weight, the same style, the same material. Different colours, identical experience.
These things could easily be mistaken for me being really committed to certain brands. I’m not.
This is my mental equivalent of getting up early and practising very slow movements in the park. Something like tai chi, if you squint. The kind of scene that looks serene and purposeful in an action movie, where the character is clearly preparing for something.
It’s much less cinematic to watch me simply repeat the same choices over and over again. What this buys me is energy. Not more of it — just less wasted. I arrive places calmer. I’m not already tired from the logistics of getting there. I have more attention left for the people I’m with, more capacity for the thing I actually showed up to do.
The bus route, the clothes, the jewellery — they don’t make my life smaller. They make it quieter. They remove friction in places where friction adds nothing, so I can spend what I have on the parts that matter.
Or: how my brain keeps shouting “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE” during perfectly normal interactions.
There’s a part of my brain that is deeply committed to my survival. Unfortunately, it is also extremely dramatic, wildly overconfident, and deeply uninterested in nuance.
This is the amygdala. Its job is to notice danger and react fast. It does not care whether the threat is actually happening now. It cares about patterns. Similarities. Vibes. A tone shift that vaguely reminds it of something that happened years ago and which it has never emotionally recovered from.
It is not subtle. It is also not open to feedback.
Everything Is Fine, Except Apparently It Isn’t
In relationships, this manifests as volume.
A delayed reply becomes abandonment. A change in tone becomes rejection. A quiet evening becomes proof that something is wrong and I should emotionally prepare for exile.
Logically, I know this is nonsense. Physically, my body does not give a shit what I know.
Because the amygdala doesn’t speak in sentences. It speaks in sensations. Tight chest. Clenched jaw. A sudden urge to either explain everything or disappear completely. Fight, flight, freeze, sometimes all three before lunch.
(Yes, a lunch I’ve probably forgotten to eat.)
This is the part of me that fears loss before it happens. The part that learned, early on, that connection could vanish without warning. It doesn’t wait for evidence. It doesn’t ask follow-up questions. It just hits the alarm and leaves me to deal with the emotional admin.
The truly irritating thing is that fear feels exactly like intuition when it shows up in the body.
For years, I mistook anxiety for insight. I thought I was being perceptive. Careful. Emotionally intelligent. In reality, I was just catastrophising with confidence and calling it foresight.
In Which I Am Actually Being Reasonable
What really adds insult to injury is that my behaviour is usually… fine.
I’m communicating. I’m asking for clarity. I’m noticing patterns without accusing anyone of crimes.
If someone else described doing exactly what I’m doing, I’d nod along and say, yes, that sounds healthy and proportionate.
My amygdala, however, loses her entire mind.
To her, this is not calm communication. This is escalation. This is exposure. This is the exact moment before everything goes catastrophically wrong. The same actions, viewed internally, are suddenly accompanied by sirens, flashing lights, and a voice shouting “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON.”
Abort mission. Retreat immediately. Or overshare wildly. Possibly both.
She is not fair. She does not scale her response to the situation. She takes perfectly sensible actions and adds a dramatic soundtrack and spends the whole budget on fireworks, just in case.
The Double Standard, Featuring Spoons
Then there’s the double standard, which I find particularly offensive.
When I cancel plans because I’m out of spoons, it’s reasonable. When I realise that past me had wildly different ideas about what was achievable in a single day, that’s also reasonable. Annoying, yes, but reasonable. And in truth I should get a gold star for not pushing through and people pleasing. (But that’s a post for another day.)
I cancel plans. I apologise. I reschedule if I can. And crucially, I know that none of this means I don’t care. I still love these people. I still want to spend time with them. The desire didn’t evaporate just because my capacity did.
That part feels obvious to me.
When someone else does the exact same thing?
Obviously they’re pulling away. Obviously they’ve bored. Obviously they’ve realised something and are quietly planning their exit.
Never mind that I understand this perfectly well when it’s me. Never mind that I know, from the inside, how much love can exist alongside a last-minute cancellation. Context collapses. Compassion evaporates.
The rule book changes depending on who’s holding it.
Logically, I know this is absurd.
That this is not a threat.
Emotionally, my body is already packing a bag and rehearsing a sad little monologue about being abandoned and the smallest violin is playing just for me.
Again: not fair. Not evidence-based. Not even especially imaginative. Just a threat-detection system applying wildly inconsistent standards and insisting “this is vigilance, actually.”
Past Me Is a Terrible Project Manager
I think part of this is finally accepting that past me is not a reliable project manager. She is optimistic. She is ambitious. She looks at a day and says, yes, we can absolutely fit all of that in, and then disappears, leaving present me to deal with the consequences.
When I cancel plans, I’m often not choosing between people and rest. I’m correcting an earlier miscalculation. I’m adjusting reality to something my body, my brain can actually sustain. And that doesn’t undo the wanting. It doesn’t touch the affection. It just acknowledges that enthusiasm is not the same thing as energy.
I understand this when I’m the one making the call. I’m learning, slowly, to offer other people the same generosity. To trust that their present selves are also cleaning up after an overcommitted past version.
This, too, is not a threat.
Other People Exist, Inconveniently
I’m also learning, and this one really tests my patience, that other people have whole areas of their lives that exist without me in it. Friendships I’m not part of. Conversations I’ll never hear. Days that do not orbit my presence or absence.
And that this is, still, not a threat.
It’s not a withdrawal. It’s not a quiet rehearsal of leaving. It’s just… reality.
Other people having full, textured lives doesn’t diminish my place in theirs. It doesn’t mean I’m replaceable or forgettable or already on my way out. It just means I am not the sole load-bearing structure holding everything up.
Which, when I actually sit with it, is more relieving than frightening.
How wonderful it is that I have relationships with people who have rich, full lives of their own? How treasured it is to be chosen as part of that? Not by default, not by obligation, but intentionally. How rich it is to know that the people I love show up fully present when they’re with me, not tired, not overwhelmed, not running on fumes?
They come rested. They come willingly. They come because they want to be there.
Just like I do with them.
Other people having full, textured lives doesn’t diminish my place in theirs. It doesn’t make me replaceable or forgettable or already on my way out. It just means I’m not the sole load-bearing structure holding everything up.
And that, it turns out, is not a threat… It’s abundance.
Updating the Operating System
And I think this is the real friction point: the crisis-management style of my amygdala doesn’t fit the life current me actually has.
That approach made sense once. Hypervigilance, over-preparing, scanning constantly for exits. Those were reasonable strategies in a life that felt unstable. But my life now is quieter. Safer. More ordinary, in the best possible way. The emergencies are smaller. The stakes are lower. The threats are mostly imagined.
My amygdala, however, has not updated the brief.
She treats minor emotional discomfort like a five-alarm fire. She responds to scheduling conflicts with the same intensity she once reserved for real danger. She cannot tell the difference between this is uncomfortable and this is unsafe, and she would very much like me to act quickly, while because she can’t see beyond the hill of this crisis.
I don’t need to dismantle the alarm system. I don’t even need to silence her.
I just need to stop letting her run the day-to-day operations of a life that no longer requires constant emergency response.
Current me gets to choose tools that fit. Tools that assume continuity instead of collapse. Tools that trust that care doesn’t vanish overnight, that people don’t disappear because of one cancelled plan, that love can exist alongside rest.
So when the alarm goes off now, I’m learning to pause. I’m starting to check the facts. I remind myself that past me had a very different job, and did the best she could with what she had.
“First you need to take the yarn in your right hand…“
I didn’t go to a class, or learn from a wise relative passing down ancient yarn secrets. I learned to knit from YouTube — which means my teachers were mostly disembodied hands with suspiciously good manicures.
I was pregnant with my first child, and I wanted to make a baby blanket. It’s so cliche it cool. The blanket was simple, except I choose to do colourwork too, because I can’t possibly start with something plain. It was finished before my baby was born, but did not survive contact with the babies dad putting it directly into the washing machine. Wool on a regular wash. Dear Reader, I cried.
Somehow, despite the destruction of my first finished item, I’m actually pretty good at it. My stitches are neat. My tension’s solid. I’ve tackled socks, lace, different types of colourwork. All the things that make non-knitters look at you like you’ve just solved a maths equation in your head, no problem mate, done it.
The Strange Fate of Finished Objects
Here’s the thing though: I rarely wear or keep anything I make. I can knit a pair of socks that fit perfectly, and then hand them over to someone else like they’re a disposable coffee cup. Scarves, hats, mittens — they all wander off to other people’s wardrobes, while mine remains conspicuously empty of anything I’ve actually made.
The four finished items* in the photo at at the top, all completed in 2024, all about to go off to other people this month**. One will be a birthday gift for someone’s mum, another sent further north to keep a neck warm, one posted onwards to decorate the back of an armchair, and the last to a teenager who is just excited to get a handmade item.
Why Knitting Stuck (When Other Things Didn’t)
There’s something about the rhythm of it that works on my brain in a way most “self-care” activities don’t.
Running collapsed under the weight of one very soggy marathon. Journaling can be as much a way to blame myself for things, as it is a way to off load things that are eating up my mental RAM. And stretching? That’s just me having an argument with my hips***.
But knitting? Knitting sticks. Even when I put it down for months, I always pick it back up, and it always feels like coming back to something useful.
Not Quite Useful, But Definitely Mine
It doesn’t “heal” me. It doesn’t “fix” me. But it does give my restless hands something to do, and my restless mind a puzzle to chew on. There’s a similar metronome of movement that I once found in running, giving me a small pocket of quiet in my brain. It fends off the existential dread with a mantra of “knit, knit, purl.”
Not all hobbies have to be deep and meaningful. Sometimes it’s just loops of yarn and a bit of distraction, and that’s enough.
So yes, I’m self-taught, I’m good at it, and yet my drawers are mostly full of yarn waiting for it’s moment rather than finished objects… because god forbid I ever keep something nice for myself.****
*Yes, two of those finished items are crochet. Don’t be picky.
**No, I’ve not sold them. I don’t need to make money of this, and to be honest the admin of someone covering the cost of the yarn is simply not something I give a fuck about. You like the item? Great. Take it. Enjoy.
***The second child caused that hip problem. I knit them a blanket too. It was much simpler than the first one I made, but did have a cute hood.
****This is probably something I need to think more about.
Not because I was out living some glamorous life but because Alien Earth dropped and apparently I have zero impulse control when it comes to streaming sci-fi. I was going to try and nap in the early evening, but I’m just really bad at napping. Which, when you consider I’m over 40, is just unfair.
But now it’s the next day, and I’m on the floor doing hip and ankle stretches, questioning every life choice that led me here. My body feels like it’s made entirely of knots and bad decisions. My brain is still somewhere in deep space. My coffee is just out of reach.
Stretching like this always makes me feel a bit ridiculous. The movements are slow, awkward, and very much not cool person material. But here’s the thing: I need it. My ankles have the mobility of a stubborn Victorian door hinge, and my hips did not enjoy pregnancy fifteen years ago and just won’t stop reminding me. If I don’t keep moving them, they will absolutely stage a rebellion.
So I keep going. Leaning, twisting, holding. Leaning, rotating, stumbling. Leaning, stretching, swearing.
It’s not glamorous, it’s not fast, and it’s definitely not going on an 80s workout montage. And when I finally stand up, I feel a little better, a little more human, not smug enough to justify last night’s sci-fi binge. But at least I did it.
Will I go to bed earlier next time? Absolutely not. We might just have to resign ourselves to the fact that I’ll be awake at one in the morning every Wednesday for the next 7 weeks.
But I’ll stretch again tomorrow. Consider it my way of negotiating peace between my passions and my joints.
