There’s a small pile of knitted squares on my desk. Each is done in a different stitch, with different leftover yarns from my mother’s impressive collection. The quality is…varied, to say the least. One square begins with a seed stitch and then switches to a rib stitch because I forgot what I was supposed to be doing and accidentally swapped stitches. Heck, even calling them squares might be stretching it. Nevertheless, there they are and here I am, adding to the pile. I’m not even sure what I’ll do with them, to be honest. Maybe I’ll use them as blankets for action figures. Maybe I’ll use them as the worst coasters ever. Maybe I’ll sew them together into a blanket for my nephew who’s too young to have aesthetic sensibilities and can’t tell me it’s hideous. Who knows? Regardless, I’ll keep going because there’s an immeasurable satisfaction in producing an actual, concrete object as the end result of my work. 

Aside from the garishly-coloured patches made of yarn from 2011, there’s two separate spiral notebooks full of pencil sketches of (if it’s possible) even worse quality. Stick figures, doodled flowers, random notes, characters I like and people I know run amok across the poor-quality paper in freehand sketches, tracings and that thing where you squint really hard at a picture and try to recreate something similar but it ends up looking like a bootleg version they sell you for a quarter of the price on a seedy website with unnervingly low prices and you should know better but you still order it and get annoyed when it looks horrible. These drawings are not good, rest assured, and not for the world to see, but they’re mine, and no matter what I get a sense of satisfaction from seeing them, something I actually made, something to show I can project images in my mind onto paper and somehow produce an image that makes sense. 

Moving on, there’s more things like this scattered around my apartment. A guitar (even though I was once tested to make sure I’m not tone-deaf), a sewing kit and jewellery-making supplies (I made a choker once. It broke.), clay frogs (some may say they’re terrifying, I see them as my misshapen taco-faced children) and exercise equipment (I WILL do a pull-up one day, just watch me). Sometimes it feels like an overwhelming amount of stuff crammed into 26 square metres already occupied by school stuff, video game consoles and a life-size Ditto plush (my crown jewel), but I actually find a measure of motivation in it. 

The point of this esoteric rambling and apartment tour is as follows: I am 23 years old and I am not good at these things: my knitting is hideous, my drawings subpar, my crafts fragile, my frogs fever dream-like and my physical fitness levels low, but I’m trying. With most of these things, I’m trying for the first time, either in years or, well, ever. I’ve spent my whole life strictly defining myself and my skills by the few things I took to naturally, too impatient, insecure or embarrassed to try learning something that would take more effort or patience. It’s so much easier to watch other people do something and convince yourself that, well, you tried that once and it didn’t go too well so you weren’t meant to do it. Too bad. 

That’s how I meandered through life for about twenty years or so, until it hit me. The big one. The inescapable fate of everyone living in the late 2010s and early 2020s. That’s right, COVID rolled into town and I was locked in with nowhere to escape from myself. So I had to make peace with that bastard in the mirror. And I did. I went on medication, cut my hair (which fiction has taught us all is very important), destroyed a pot with a bad attempt at steaming and got to work with all the time left on my hands. I started small, from strength exercises and braiding with four strands and kept moving up, using reserves of patience I didn’t even know I had because there honestly wasn’t anything to do during COVID than to be patient. 

I’ll admit that I’ve had a smoother path with both COVID and learning new skills than many might. I lived with my sister back then, so I wasn’t left completely isolated, and I come from a skilled family. My little sister is artistic, my twin sister is musical, her boyfriend has actually good judgement so I don’t end up picking out the worst equipment, my mom is the one who’s actually teaching me to knit and my nephew seems to think my knitted squares are delicious (or then he just puts everything in his mouth). I’ve had the luxury of time and support not everyone has, but I’d still like to believe part of it all is thanks to just myself. I’ve made an active decision and effort to learn, to try, to break my self-imposed circle of giving up and incompetence. It’s so frustrating, and it can be so unfair and hard at times, but it can also be so rewarding, even if it’s just playing Zombie by The Cranberries without grazing the wrong string, or a silly sketch, or a lumpy frog on your bookshelf. You made it happen and that alone should be celebrated, as all creation deserves to be. 

Maybe one day I’ll take another step forward and reclaim things I’ve left halfway once more. Maybe I’ll pick up the violin again (to the horror of everyone in a 100 metre radius), maybe I’ll go back to Irish dance classes (once again, sorry to everyone in my vicinity), maybe I’ll start swimming again, or singing in a choir, or maybe I’ll pick up one of my unfinished creative writing projects, who knows? We’re all a patchwork of mismatched skills and knowledge, and to extend my knitting project onto a horribly metaphorical level, it’s fine to leave things unfinished but I want to pick up my half-made squares and finish them one day to add to my other squares, new and old.  I just have to keep pushing myself forward, and so should you. Even if it’s slow and boring and we stumble around. And if someone tells us it’s too late then we will do it again out of sheer spite. 

Because you know what? My frogs are beautiful, and so are yours. If not on the outside, then the sheer grit and effort put into making them alone makes them so. A hundred times more beautiful than anything else.