1. Sickness is a weird thing, it truly is. When you’re healthy it seems so unimportant and boring. Then along comes, oh, say, a mystery fever of doom and knocks you sideways for a month and you can’t do anything at all except lie down a lot and you realise how very very necessary good health is. And what a wuss you are for complaining SO MUCH about a few weeks of exhaustion when this is basically how many people with chronic conditions live all the time. Wow. Hats off to you, exhausted people. You’re amazing.
2. About all I have managed to do in the past few weeks, slowly recovering from mystery fever of doom, is blog a little. (Knitting appears to be too tiring. Go figure.) I have so loved reading about the wonderful GAL designers I’m interviewing (two more coming up this week) but their great awesomeness has me thinking Thoughts. About where I’m at and why. About the excuses I make for myself. About efficiency and putting your talents to best use and… well. I’m not going to stop designing, because (a) I bloody love it and (b) I’m not sure what else I could actually be doing with my time, but I don’t exactly seem to be a natural born designer, even though I’ve been doing it (for myself) most of my life. (In contrast: I am a natural born editor. I kick ass at editing. I do it faster and better than anyone I know, almost without effort, and I’m sorry for how that sounds, but facts is facts.) So, logically, it’s kind of dumb (or at least, economically inefficient) for me to be putting my energies into something I’m not really shining at.
If I’m not going to stop, what do I change? For one thing, I change what I design. No more kids’ knits. That was never my plan, it was just what fit into my life, but it’s not really what I care about and evidently not what I’m good at. (Elfbaby aside, my kids’ designs have sold basically nothing at all.) Let me put my energy into the designs I dream about, and see if that makes a difference.
3. It sucks to be a (nearly) 40-year-old underachiever. I was used to being an underachiever in high school already, and I didn’t much care. Dumb. I wish so much that I had learned discipline, instead of too often taking the easy way and doing only as much as was fun. Now, I look at those amazing designers who’ve achieved so much while their kids are still babies; I look at the astonishing women in my knitting group, high-flying expats with brilliant educations and careers (usually on hold while they follow their partners around the world – it’s a weird existence), and I feel like I’ve wasted my brain. I have a perfectly good brain. I could have done, certainly not anything (I’m no genius), but a lot, if I’d wanted to and had put my back into it. I feel stupid, both for not having done more in the past (making stupid choices), and for having so little used my brain that I guess I’ve lost a lot of the ability to think properly. It sucks.
4. Don’t worry, I’m not actually beating myself up about all this. Just taking stock. Admittedly finding it a bit depressing. But it’s all about assessing where I’m at, halfway through my life (I’ll be 40 in March), and what I can improve in the next half. No conclusions yet.
5. Something cheerfuller. I watched a Swiss German film! Ohne Subtitel! And I sort of mostly understood it!
Admittedly the film in question was Heidi. (Special Christmas treat premiere for families of SRF employees.) So I had a head start. Also, half the action takes place in Frankfurt, and those bits were a whole lot easier. BUT STILL. Go me!
(It’s a lovely version, btw, recommended. Heidi wears trousers (praktisch, oder?) and is totally engaging.)
Woolly thoughts (and fuzzy logic) 
Best advice I was ever given:
"Don’t be so hard on yourself".
You’re a marvel, and need to know it.