It's been a long year...

It hasn't even felt like a year, it's just felt like my life has been on pause and I've been searching for the remote this whole time. I haven't sat at my sewing machine since February of 2014, except to finish edges of cross-stitch fabric... and it felt strange and unnatural.

Nothing to do with the last time I posted on my blog, just life things. No energy, no motivation, no appetite. Lots of pain, lots of frustration, lots of setbacks. We moved during the summer, somehow it felt like that sapped my energy for three+ months. We move again this May. We still live in the desert, though. I feel so stagnant out here, yet there's a never-ending feeling of transience, like I can't let my breath out and be settled no matter what I do. My sewing space went untouched for months in our new home. Even now, with it prepared and ready to go, it sits like it waits for someone else. Sometimes I would sit and look at my obligations and my fabrics and the possibilities and guilts and then just quietly get up and close the door.

The weight of having obligations gone unmet for over a year is slowly killing me. Every day, I wake up and I think of someone, somewhere, disappointed because of me and my inabilities. Every quilt block haunts me, somehow. And yet, no matter how pure my intentions or motivations, I physically could not sit up and focus or concentrate or muscle past pain for the amount of time that sewing requires. No matter how bad I feel, feelings cannot force physical results from me that are impossible to meet. I do not know in what other words to describe disability.

Please, I ask for respect and understanding. I have record of and know of almost every single person I owe something to - there are a few things that I remember the item but not the name attached to them. Mostly it's my bee groups and handmade birthday group, but there were a couple of private, impromptu swaps that fell off my radar. I just need to know what I can do to make it up. If you'd rather a personal favor than a sewing one, I can do that. I have many talents and skills that I would love to use to help others out.

My goal for this next year is to be more transparent. To share more. I hold lots of things very close, and don't even realize it. But I want to share, even if it means a less perfectly presented blog post, a less edited and harder to understand series of paragraphs. Not everything has to be perfect.

Of course, I meant to write something like this around the new year, like every one else did (new year, new start; always feels so fresh and clean). So I guess my more obvious imperfection starts now.

I'm planning on posting about the things I've been doing in the interim, maybe taking pictures of the small steps I've taken in the last year will be a good visual reminder (to me, if no one else) that small amounts of progress still means progress, and is something to be proud of. I also have a fabric/quilt related post that will be coming up soon as well ♥ I'm feeling excited to sew and create for the first time in forever, I'm even starting to write a little bit again, and branching out into making art and sharing it (very new to me, this whole sharing-personal-things thing).

I hope I have pretty things to show here again ♥