SquarePeg Books

I’ve referred to a spot in the basement as my own personal Area 51, filled with boxes and bags of projects that were started and never completed (hence, UFO – UnFinished Objects). I didn’t think it was a big area, maybe three feet by four feet by four feet. It wasn’t a slap’n’dash pile of horror like other areas of the crafting storage zone are – you know that spot in your own home, the “I’ll put it away properly when I have time and feel like it” pile that kinda grows until you’re forced to regurgitate the whole room to sort and organize and restructure your “system” that kinda fell apart.

My UFO pile was relatively neat and tidy. Each project had its own container, sometimes with notes about what I was doing and what I still needed to do to finish. These UFO’s aren’t because I’m particularly flighty (most of the time), they’re generally the result of “Oh, crap, I have to put this away for now and focus on this other thing that has an actual deadline and can actually affect things” or “Dammit, I know I want to do X, but I’m not sure how to do it, so I’m going to put it away for a little while and let my subconscious work on it” or “I’ve physically injured myself too much to keep going with this project right now, so I’ll get back to it when my fingers have stopped bleeding”.  If I’m honest, there are probably a few “Eh, I’m bored with this project right now” in the pile,  too,

I may have also mentioned a few times (ad nauseum) that I deal with mental illness. That I’ve gone through dark spots that inhibit basic functionality and totally trash creativity. The uncertainty of COVID and other events that have decided to jump on the Jumanji bandwagon haven’t helped my mental state.

But with the beginning of the lockdowns back in March, several people I follow on social media mentioned their own UFO piles that they would tackle since they couldn’t leave home to avoid them. In this environment of peer pressure, I resolved to do the same – I’m a Stay-At-Home Mom, my writing has gone to crap since Halloween, and I can think of it as a version of Spring Cleaning. Maybe it will reduce the subconscious clutter and knock the writing brain cells loose.

So I tackle my Area 51 (no Naruto running – I’m in my 40’s now and that’s a good way to end up in the emergency room).  The first few weeks were a drudgery – there was an odd psychological resistance I fought with, day after day. It wasn’t something I could quite pin down, I just… didn’t have the energy to confront the UFO’s. I didn’t want to confront the UFO’s. It felt like I was “putting my affairs in order” or some such, perhaps. It was exhausting to even think about picking up a project and ACTUALLY finishing it.

But I made myself do it. I talk to myself A LOT, so coaching myself with the “C’mon, kid. Just finish one line of beadwork; just sew these seams; just take measurements; just do one thing and then if you have the energy, we’ll do another thing” for each and every project. (Except writing. I think I might have pissed off my muse so we’re not talking right now, or maybe she’s taken up with a dude in Angkor Wat, I’m not sure. Ine any case, writing has not occurred.)

And there are A LOT more UFO’s than I thought I had. If I had to guess, steadyish work has gotten me through about half of them at this point. Some were quite easy to accomplish, and I can’t rightly figure out why I didn’t finish them up in the beginning. Perhaps I had bigger, grander plans for the project, but time and distance has made me accept a more practical and quicker finish to it. Others had more work involved in getting them to a place of completion – I didn’t have enough of the right materials, generally.

I began to feel better. Slowly. Not because I was “being creative again” but more because I was getting things done. I’m actually ACCOMPLISHING things.

But the more I do, the more I realize I have still more to do. Things I hadn’t put on the UFO list because I didn’t want to acknowledge them at all – like making masks for my family (talk about psychological resistance to that–it was like slogging through thick mud, waist deep, day after day for weeks when that particular project should have only taken a week, at most), updating my Healthcare Power of Attorney and stuff (when I finally did, I realized that the people I had on that list were not people I’d talked to in nearly a decade, so maybe might want to change that since I’m not certain where they are anymore), and, of course, the email and social media backlog (something on the order of 500 emails, unread, blog posts not being done, tagging people back like I should be doing, etc).

I’m getting to them all. Slowly. Completing one project and moving on to the next takes a lot more time than anyone wants to admit. I’ve got several going at the same time – if my fingers get tired over here from handsewing, I can focus on emails over there; if I finish this thingy, but don’t want to dive into machine-sewing patched yardage right now  because that will require I dominate the entire dining room for several hours (because I have to clean up to allow people to eat or some such other thing, and those interruptions are just plain irritating) I can wind this yarn that I’ve dyed.

It does make me feel better to get things out of the way, though it is demoralizing to think “I can see the bedrock!” Only to discover, “no, that’s not the bottom of the pile, hon, that’s just a layer that’s REALLY compressed. Keep digging.”

But I suppose progress is progress.