Fly, Fly Away: Crocheting a Path Back to the Body

Content warning: suicidal thinking

Dear Reader,

I don’t remember when exactly I started with the butterflies. Initially it was crowns. I had already made a couple crochet crowns for some friends’ birthdays and two for my nieces last Christmas. I made a few more, experimenting with adding some crochets jewels in all the different colours of sparkly yarn I had left over from my previous projects. Purple, fuchsia, teal, a cobalt blue, a light ballet pink.

I tend to crochet in phases. I’ll take on a project, usually for someone else because that’s the best way to motivate myself, and crochet like a mad person until my hands and fingers start to ache and I physically need a break. Usually I’ll stop for anywhere from a few months to a year.

After the assault, when I began to sink into a deeper depression, it seemed like a natural thing to turn to again—I had been on hiatus for a few months as I gave my hands a break.

I crocheted some crowns and thought about starting a bigger project for myself like a blanket or cardigan. Then one day I decided to look up a tutorial for how to crochet a butterfly.

I didn’t mean to make so many. But once I started and had the pattern memorized, it was hard to stop. I experimented with all the possible colour combos I could thing of before I ran out of sparkly yarn, and then I found two skeins of yarn I had had for years—one a deep gradient purpley-grey-almost-green colour that I remembered buying over ten years ago with the intention of making a scarf—and the other skein was the yarn I had bought back in 2021 when D and I went to Michaels and decided to learn how to crochet. It’s a multi-coloured warm-toned yarn, morphing from red to orange to yellow to green to brown to pink and back to red. It looks and feels like Autumn.

They just came together so fast, the butterflies. You just make this flower/sun-shaped granny square, then you chain ten to twelve stitches to make the “body” and a five stitch chain for the antennae and then folding the main piece in half, wrap the tail around and sew it into place.

It was an activity I could do lying down. I spent a lot of time lying down. It kept my brain occupied while not requiring a ton of mental energy, just opening up a kind of space in my mind that comes from repeating the same action over and over again.

Something about the sensation of the yarn sliding between my fingers, against the cool metal of the crochet hook, the glints of sparkly thread wrapped around the regular thread. The dopamine hit of finishing a project, having something I could touch, feel, rub against my cheek and think, I made this. Sometimes bringing something into existence when you yourself don’t feel like existing feels like a miracle.

When I didn’t know what to do or I couldn’t bring myself to do anything else, I crocheted. It was a simple ritual to cling onto as my body was processing what had happened. When I felt myself starting to float away, it tethered me to the ground, this embodied practice of stitching and weaving and sewing.

And when the suicidal thoughts began creeping back in and I found myself, more and more, slumped over on the couch in a state of hazy paralysis, wondering what the point of anything was and whether I had the energy to keep waking up and trying—I crocheted. I focused on my hands, my fingers doing their repetitive dance with the yarn and hook.

By the time my obsession started to cool down, I had made over thirty butterflies. I thought about a craft project I could do with them—creating some sort of sculpture, or avant-garde piece of clothing. In the end, I ended up mailing 20 of them to my mom for her to give to relatives. I gave a few away to some friends. It’s a nice thing to give to someone. Here is something that won’t fly away. Here is something you can hold.

My mom used to work as a labour and delivery nurse and whenever there was a stillborn, they would put a butterfly sticker on the door.

I’ve heard of people who struggle with self harm drawing butterflies on their scars.

There’s no shortage of metaphors and symbolism for them, although I wasn’t thinking about any of that while I was churning them out, other than in a vague and abstract way. I was self-regulating, trying to stay afloat. Going through the motions, hoping that somewhere along the line, I’d start to crochet my way back to myself.

And last week, on my walk to therapy, I finally saw a butterfly.

I hope you see a butterfly or something small and beautiful this week,

If you’d like to support my work but don’t want to commit to a paid membership, you can buy me a one-time “coffee” over on my Ko-fi page! Every little bit helps me to keep creating. <3

Kofi