Tag Archives: cognitive complexity

I first learned to knit at an eating disorder conference. The presenter was using knitting as a metaphor for what recovery was like. It’s so difficult to figure out how to get started, or to think you’ve made progress, only to have to rip everything out. The presenter was totally addicted to knitting but clever. And it’s true. Knitting has taught me a lot about life.

Last night I was working for several hours on this dress for my niece, only to have to rip out every row except one. Four hours of knitting for one row.

I only have myself to blame. It’s a complicated pattern where every stitch has to be accurate, and I knew I had messed up but I figured, it’s at the end of the row. It will be at the seam. I can make it work!  I’ve made this mistake hundreds of times, and it always costs me in the end. In knitting and in life. This guy has trauma? Addictions? ADHD? Narcissistic Personality Disorder? No problem! I can fix him! I can make it work!

My problem is that I love complicated patterns. I love to be challenged. Most people find a pattern for a scarf that they like and they knit 5 of them. I, on the other hand, decide to knit something like a dress, which takes months to knit, and when I’m done I never want to see the pattern again.

I’m actually selling a few of the items that I’ve knit at The Stitchin’ Post.  Even if they sell, the best I can hope for is to cover the cost of the materials, because I’m only making something like one cent an hour.

But that’s OK. I’m not doing it for the money. To me, patterns are more like puzzles to be solved, like Minesweeper or Sudoku. A pattern that I have already mastered is boring and no longer holds my interest.

I know this makes me unusual. When I was a kid I used to untangle balls of string for fun. Well, it also bugged me that the string was not in a usable form. But I got immense satisfaction out of being able to roll it up into a ball after the last knot was untangled. And it was kind of foreshadowing that I would love kitting later in life.

My relationships follow a similar pattern. I like a challenge–someone with all kinds of issues and baggage and diagnoses. I want to hear all about their problems, learn how they developed, and figure out how to solve them. That’s why I became a psychologist. But sometimes you need to cut your losses and start over, in knitting and in life. Sometimes I can’t make it work.

Several years ago I was talking to one of my colleagues about the demise of my first marriage and she said, “marriage is hard work, but it shouldn’t be like climbing Mt. Everest.” I thought, really? It sounded that bad? I guess I was so used to what my mom tried to do to make her marriage work that what I was doing paled in comparison. I thought that marriage was supposed to be that hard.

After my second marriage ended, a good friend who knows me well dropped some wisdom on me that helped me feel less like a loser. She knew the guy, since we all played tennis. She knew how hard I tried. And she said, sometimes you can try too hard. And that has always stuck with me. Sometimes I even use it as a mantra.

There is a reason for my desire for complexity in knitting and relationships. Freud called it a repetition compulsion. But these days neuropsychologists frame it in terms of rewiring of your brain. With so much trauma, mental illness, prejudice, and discrimination from being immigrants, my brain was wired to be hypervigiliant of crisis. Hence, the “self-soothing” of trying not to blow up one of the 999 bombs in Minesweeper as a way to prepare me for sleep in my night owl post.

It’s for similar reasons that veterans come back from wars with PTSD. You’re so used to surviving, that doing something ordinary, liking picking from hundreds of different cereals at the grocery store while spending time with your family is unbearably boring. You’d rather sign up for another tour and figure out how to keep a bomb from blowing up in your face, like that guy from Hurt Locker. Who is also Hawkeye in the Avengers. A real sensation seeker.

But I digress.

I am learning how to recognize when I’m not at war, but nothing is going to change my desire for cognitive complexity. It’s like mental sensation-seeking. Some people climb Mt. Everest for fun, and I guess I like scaling psychological mountains and complicated patterns. So I’m knitting a dress for my niece for Christmas. Which I will work on again tonight.