Recently I had a conversation with a coworker about my sewing. I told her that I would sew us some shirts over the long weekend, and she replied, “Oh no! Don’t spend your rest time doing something for us! Enjoy your long weekend!”
To her surprise, I said, “You don’t understand. Sewing is my therapy!”
And it is, to some degree. Sewing is my happy place. I love to be able to let the sound of the machines just fade everything else into the background. It’s the one time that my brain actually shuts off from overthinking and overanalyzing everything. In that moment, I’m at peace.
It took me a long time to find that: peace. It took me finding my passion. My passion is closely linked with my creativity, and the joy that others receive when they are wearing or using my product. When they first claim something I created.
I have to say that I used to find that same joy when I was teaching, but over the years that faded away. Too much insertion of mandated requirements and rigid structure to teaching the subject led to less of me being inserted into my teaching. I felt more like a puppet rather than someone who was genuinely teaching students to think and examine the world they lived in through literature and reading. It felt too forced.
I think the reason is because I am a creative individual. I thrive in creativity where I have the opportunity to explore my surroundings and pull that into what I’m doing. Once that died out in teaching, teaching was no longer something I was passionate about doing. So I moved that creativity and passion over to my sewing where I had an outlet. If I tend to take on so much, it’s because I want to immerse myself into everything. I want to evolve, not just in my craft, but in my skills. I want to apply things to what I’m already doing and make it somehow more.
Hopefully in the next week or so, I can teach that passion to my granddaughter, Rose, who is wanting to learn to sew. We are going to make a quilt together. I’ll still be teaching, but it’ll be in a different avenue of learning.
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