Craft as Therapy

For my very first blog post, I'd like to share a story about how deeply grounding, nourishing and restoring craft is for me. I have no doubt, too, that I share this experience with many others. What a gift.

I've been crafting for a long time and I'm also a full time teacher. People often ask where I find the time to make things and really, if I don't find the time, I think I would be very miserable. Teaching is an incredibly rewarding job but it's so tough. It's an emotionally demanding job where I interact with people all day - making decisions, discussing issues, putting out metaphorical fires - and I love it AND it's exhausting. Making things, doing craft, is something I give back to me. It's my time, my thing, my creativity, self-directed and it is all this that nourishes me.

So last year I was in the position of having to reapply for my job. This is not an uncommon practice in teaching. Teachers have to apply year after year for the same job that they have been practicing and becoming expert in. I've done it before too but this time it was different. This time I'd started at a new school, unlike the schools I'd been in before, and I'd given 110% all year. I had busted a gut to do this job to the best of my ability and to be told that I had to reapply, suggesting that the things I had done were not valued, or worse still had made no difference, was utterly demoralising. I felt terrible (I also had a renewed sense of empathy and compassion for all my fellow teachers who must go through this process again and again).

Luckily, my first step when faced with such a challenge, was to go and make something. I pulled out fabric and thread, I dyed, printed and sewed, creating and making. I didn't think about teaching, I didn't think about work, I didn't think about all my lovely students, I just sat in a space where I felt grounded and focused. I was in a bubble of creativity and making. Now this happened to coincide with the school holidays and so I was in this bubble for a couple of weeks and - oh my goodness - it was life saving! It saved my sense of who I am, it saved my emotional well being. It gave me the time and the space to move past all the doubts that had arisen around how I valued myself and my work as a teacher. It gave me the space to find the motivation to persevere and keep going, to find resilience in the face of a big blow.

It turned out, in the end, that I didn't have to reapply and I continue to work in the same job, for which I am extremely grateful. I'm even more grateful that I can draw on craft and my process of creating and making to help me through a really tough time.

As the year approached the end, I continued to feel grounded and centred. My colleagues around me became increasingly stressed with report writing and other things, but I felt like I remained really steady. I had been spending time doing rhythmical, repetitive actions (proven to calm the sympathetic nervous system) and this had done me so much good. I was calm right through to the end. It was bliss.

And I am curious now because I know there are so many others out there that have the same kind of tools, passions and interests at their disposal, that nourish them, ground them and centre them.

What is it that you do - is it craft? When has it saved you? When has it kept you from going under, bolstered your resilience?