Saturday, January 23, 2010

AUTHENTICALLY MINE

I find myself using the word 'authentic' more than ever these days. Maybe it's quickly growing into one of those overused terms but it matters not since it still says what I mean. Yesterday while having lunch with my friends fellow-designer, Ilga Leja and her producer/model/actress/writer daughter, Hannah Epstein, our conversation drifted to why we see knitting as important. After all, the world may reason, it's only knitting. Only knitting? What notion is that? At the very least, knitting is a metaphor for connectivity, for the concious act of bringing separate elements together into one unified whole. But it's so much more.

Not long ago, Dear Reader, I was a very sick puppy, so sick, in fact, that I had no idea how deeply into the hole I had fallen. My brain fogged over, my body gave out. I became more than a little pathetic as I trudged through my job pretending to believe in all the policies and regulations my corporation had put into place to protect itself. On a daily basis, my job required me to do and say things in which, at the core, I didn't believe. I had stopped living a life atuned to my beliefs and had become a sham. Sham living is toxic; it always gets you in the end.

When I finally ended up at home, all I could do at first was knit, putting colors together by drawing on some deep well of creativity beyond words. It's as if I didn't need to think, I could just do. Those days and days spent with yarn and needles helped put Jane back together again, giving me time and space to knit the fragments of who I was and what I believed back into a cohesive whole. I found my authentic self, vowing never again to put myself into positions where I couldn't say and do as I believed.

It's always a struggle to remain true to you. We are still mindful of not hurting others just for the brief pleasure of venting our spleens but living authentically does not preclude being kind or concious of others. Far from it. Living authentically is not banging yourself day after day against policies and rules which don't sing true to you and doing so for a paycheck or a benefit package.

Lately I've received many emails from those trapped in situations from which they want to escape but can't see how.  They ask me how I did and my answer is the same: I had no choice. My body and soul rebelled, pitching me into the hospital and, finally, down the long road to regain health and self. You can wait until your back is against the wall and possibily broken or you can begin taking steps to align who you are with what you do. Either way, at some point, you will need to begin knitting yourself whole again.

And here's a little irony: I used to believe that the best jobs were the high-paying, high-status, ones like I once had. Now I see working supposedly 'menial' (only corporate giants could come up with such a term) as just as valuable as any other. As long as your ethics aren't hamstrung and you can pass on a smile or a little ease to another human being, you're good.

And I will never again judge who I am by how much I earn. When people ask what I do and I say I knit or design rather than citing a position of status, I almost sound gleeful. Now at last who I am is what I do.

It's January. I'm thinking you're craving color, too