This piece sat in my substack drafts for over a year, feeling just a little too a) full of itself and b) vulnerable to share. Upon a recent re-read, however, I decided to just ship it. And so, my friends, here we are. Enjoy! Or don’t. That’s your business.
The towels
When I was a little kid, my grandmother had a large collection of these very specific towels in rich brown, orange, peach, and yellow. She would dry us off with them after every bath at her house. They smelled like talcum powder, fresh laundry, and safety. They smelled like my grandma. They smelled like happiness.
Judging by the color palette and the fact that many of them had already been artfully mended, they had already been around for a while by the time I was attaching these towels to my psyche in the 90s.
When my grandma died in 2016, there were still a handful of them in circulation. Like any piece of cloth we humans cling to out of sentimentality, they were impossibly soft and becoming threadbare. A little frayed in places, and significantly faded from the bold, funky colors of their/my youth to soft pastel yellows and millennial pinks. I took them home, and they entered regular rotation in my house where they continued their heartbreaking decline.
Today, there are a few left. Two that are technically intact enough to still be called towels, and one or two more that I sobbed while cutting into household rags about a year and a half ago. As if to be a constant reminder of the shameful thing I had done, those rags frayed and deposited their loose threads with a fury and determination you simply can not imagine.
Enter the blanket stitch
Feeling that I owe these towels a personal debt of care, I refused (and still refuse) to throw the shedding offenders out.
Good thing, too, because now it’s illegal.
After more research than is probably justifiable for a literal pile of rags, I decided that the most honorable thing to do would be to trim down the fraying and edge each of the rags with a line of blanket stitching. This would serve to add some structural integrity back to the rags, in addition to solving the fraying problem.
The problem is, the blanket stitch is, objectively, the ugliest stitch known to man.
It is best described as looking like crooked teeth drawn by a toddler in jumbo crayon.
It’s impossible to make it look dainty or tidy (believe me, I’ve tried) and in trying to do so you begin to negate the purpose of using the blanket stitch in the first place.
This, friends, is the blanket stitch:
The blanket stitch has two primary purposes: binding together two or more pieces of fabric (a la those double-sided fleece blankets that were inescapable in the early aughts and 20-teens), and edging either for the purposes of decoration (ew, why?) or reinforcement.
This particular stitch is easy to do and is helpful for preventing fraying and stretching, which makes it an ideal choice for more utilitarian, homespun crafts. I’m not one to argue with experts when they say a given tool or method is the proper thing to use for a project, even if I hate that thing.
The problem with that plan is that I am a certifiably terrible seamstress.
The process takes me - no joke - an hour or two per rag, and is so frustrating that I work on this project in very small bursts and, over a year later, I still have a few rags left to edge. In the meantime, they continue to shame me, fray, and deposit their angry threads in every load of laundry and overzealous cleaning project.
Oh shit, it’s a metaphor
I blame my late and beloved high school English teacher, Mr. Robert Davies, for my slight obsession with metaphor and symbolism.
The last year and a half or so have been the most difficult time of my life when it comes to my own mental health. I know I am not alone in this, to the point where it almost feels silly and self-indulgent to even mention it. But, for the sake of this story, I will say that I have come to identify deeply with my rags.
During my long, slow, mending sessions, I painstakingly add this (objectively hideous) stitching along the edges in a largely futile attempt to slow the decay. The new threads artlessly tacked between the old ones in an attempt to shore up the cloth and keep it from unraveling. Coming apart entirely.
While drafting this newsletter, I had to pause here for a long while.
This complicated and imperfect web of symbolism stretches out a long way in many different directions, some of them more hopeful than others. I have decided, based largely on who I know will read this, to swing things back in that direction from here.
However, I would like to take this opportunity to say that if you are struggling with depression, you are not alone. You are more loved than you know. And the way you’re feeling won’t last forever. You don’t have to figure out a way to get through everything, just get through today. And if you ever need help getting through today, please know that you can reach out to me. My phone number is 804-386-6524. You can also call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
The logical parts of my brain know that cut-up bits of 40(+/-?)-year-old terrycloth are perhaps not worth hours upon hours of my time, labor, and mental energy. For a lot of very sound reasons, it would make more sense to just give up. To (literally) throw in the towel. But the fact is, I’m not doing it for what the rags are right now. I’m doing it for what they used to be. What they mean to me. For the cocktail of complicated and beautiful emotions I feel every time I look at them. For the memory of the love and care that once poured into me, conducted through those cotton fibers like some kind of soft and cozy electrical grid. For the day in the future when a reminder of all of those things is exactly the thing I needed.
My mending may be difficult and tedious and ugly and imperfect and coarse. It may (and, in fact, already does) need to be touched up in places. It may, in some light, be a harsh reminder of how much the cloth has changed from what it once was.
However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about mending recently, it’s that mending isn’t really about making something back into what it used to be. You are always necessarily creating something at least a little bit new and different. This new thing will of course be influenced by its past, but there is something to celebrate in what is different too.
If you take a step back, tilt your head, and really look at it, isn’t that what life is, too? A series of patches, scars, and additions that we collect as we go along, making our way from being one thing to being something else entirely? And isn’t that, well…objectively beautiful and worthwhile?
So maybe the blanket stitch is still hideous. (It definitely is.) Especially as stitched by me. And maybe I’m still not quite ready to look at it in an entirely new and dazzling light. But I can appreciate it for what it is and what it is helping me to achieve. I can appreciate that the work I’m doing is helping me eke out a little bit more time with a small reminder of a person who meant the world to me. And that’s worth it.