Embroidery is my preferred creative outlet. I like to make everyday objects a little more interesting and personal. At the beginning of quarantine, when there seemed nothing else to do and I was spending all my time at home, I decided to make some curtains from old sheets and embroider them. I’ll save the process of making the curtains for a later post. Right now I just want to write about how it has given me a greater appreciation for quiet time.

Embroidery is a very time-consuming craft. The repetition can be relaxing, even meditative, but it can also cause a serious underestimation of the time needed to complete a project. I’ve been working on my curtains for over a year and I’m less than halfway finished. Three of nine curtains are serving their purpose while the fourth through ninth languish in project limbo.

When I realized the project would take much longer than anticipated, I got overwhelmed. Ideas for new projects kept adding themselves to my mental queue. I was working on my curtains almost obsessively so I could start something new. I was watching more TV than normal because I was working longer. The late-night screen time began to interfere with my sleep, and was the lack of sleep was driving me crazy. I reached a point where I realized how important it is to slow down and wind down.

I started by allowing myself to work on the curtains in smaller sessions. They were going to take forever whether I decided to race to the finish line or not. Breaking the project up also meant I could work on smaller projects in the meantime, chipping away at my queue. I spent some portion of each session, if not all of it, in silence. With no screens or audiobooks to distract me, I was able to focus more on my embroidery and achieve that meditative aspect. Falling asleep was much easier when the last half-hour before bed was not spent wrestling with the decision to watch one more episode.

That is not to say that I magically developed the ability to laser focus. I still get distracted easily. Sometimes it’s my own thoughts and worries for the coming workday. Sometimes it’s my cats’ strange obsession with the peeling paint bubble in the corner of my living room ceiling. They’re always staring up at it even though the only thing up there is the ugly off-white paint some previous tenant had to contend with.  Other times my bedroom door will move opposite the direction the floor tilts. I normally would have assumed this was the cats, but now I know one is on the couch with me and one on the chair across from me.

Sometimes I listen for the sound of my neighbors. Not always to eavesdrop, but just to know that there are other people aimlessly puttering around their apartments in the evening. The sounds comforted me during the worst of quarantine. Letting them creep me out would only make me feel more alone. I find myself imagining them in my own kitchen, my own bedroom, to the point it almost feels like someone is there, if only in the other room.

-Erica

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