Stitches in the Attic

The past week has woken me to an interesting new problem: I need another coloured square for my patchwork. If white is those days where I literally do nothing and grey is those days where I drift along, look after myself physically but do nothing of importance to me and coloured squares are for days when I do the things I wanted to, I need another specific colour. I need a colour for days that are essentially the opposite of grey days. I need a colour for the days where I get so fixated on one thing that everything else vanishes and I forget the mundane things that I meant to do. A colour for days when perhaps I didn’t leave my bed, but I achieved so much while snuggled beneath my covers. White is the wrong colour for those days because I have done something, I have just neglected myself physically and socially in the process. I think those days will be red days. Because they are good, they just aren’t sustainable.

I have been sitting in my corner of the attic with my sewing machine. For the first time in three years I hyper-focused. The fear, the commitments, the time of day, everything vanished because I had a ragdoll faery I was making and a story to listen to. I felt like the ten-year-old child I once was had been resurrected. I didn’t think that I could do that anymore. I was beginning to believe that being able to focus to the expense of everything else was something I had dreamed up. That it was something I had never really been able to do, that my memories were rose tinted. It is real though and when I am hyper-focused, it is less that the snow globe disappears and more that I simply lose awareness of it.

Of course, it would have been convenient if I could tap into hyper focus whenever I so chose and channelled it into Chemistry, but now at least I can hope that one day I will. For the last few days something has mattered not because it should matter, not because I want it to matter, it has quite simply just mattered. I have been invested in it without any kind of barrier. I am coming out of the dark.