You Get to Decide What You Believe About Yourself

You Get To Decide What You Believe About Yourself

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the things we believe about our knitting, and I asked a question that I’ve been thinking about ever since:

Who told you that?

Who told you that you were too slow? That you weren’t a natural knitter? That you always made mistakes, or that you couldn’t do colourwork, cables, lace or socks? Who decided you weren’t a Proper Knitter because you have seventeen things on the needles and still haven’t finished the cardigan you started in 2019?

Sometimes there really is a person behind those voices. Someone said something years ago, perhaps without even thinking very much about it, and somehow we’ve carried it around with us ever since.

And sometimes, if we’re truthful, nobody actually said it at all. We’ve done a perfectly good job of coming up with it ourselves.

But I’ve been thinking about what happens after we realise that, because working out where something came from doesn’t necessarily mean we stop believing it.

Last week I was at Church camp, and one of the things we were talking about was the lies we believe about ourselves. Not just recognising them and thinking, oh yes, that’s one of those things I believe that isn’t actually true, but actually challenging them. Stamping on them. Refusing to keep giving them space and authority in our lives.

And, obviously, my brain went to knitting. Because of course it did.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the things knitters believe they’re supposed to do, the rules we’ve picked up from other people and all the things we think our knitting says about us. But perhaps I’ve spent rather more time talking about getting rid of those old stories than I have thinking about what we put in their place.

Because the thing about those voices is that they don’t disappear just because we’ve spotted them. They pop up again.

You make a mistake and there it is. See. You always do this.

You don’t understand a bit of a pattern. You should know this by now.

Someone else is knitting something beautiful and complicated. You could never do that.

And I think this is where we have to do more than just notice the thought. We have to challenge it.

In my beaded knitting workshop, if we put a bead in the wrong place, there comes a point where there is only one sensible solution.

We take a hammer to it. Literally.

You don’t unpick half the knitting to rescue one tiny bead. You put the knitting somewhere safe, isolate the offending bead and smash it.

There is something deeply satisfying about it.

And perhaps we need to get a little bit better at doing that with the thoughts that keep turning up in our heads too. Not accepting them just because they appeared. Not assuming that because our own brain said something, it must be true.

Sometimes the thought needs examining. Sometimes it needs answering back. And sometimes, frankly, it needs a hammer.

I always get everything wrong. No. You don’t.

I’m too stupid to understand this. No. You haven’t understood it yet.

Everyone else can do this except me. Almost certainly not.

I’m rubbish at knitting. According to whom?

It sounds slightly ridiculous when you start answering the thoughts back like that, but I think we have to, because otherwise they just sit there unchallenged and gradually become facts.

And we are often much better at doing this for other people than we are for ourselves. If a friend sat beside me and said, “I’m so stupid, I can’t believe I did that,” I wouldn’t say, “Yes, you really are.” Obviously.

If one of my children said they were useless because they couldn’t do something, I wouldn’t agree with them. I’d tell them they were learning. I’d remind them of all the things they can do. I’d tell them one mistake doesn’t define them. I’d encourage them to try again, or ask for help, or take a break.

We spend an enormous amount of time building other people up. And then we wander around inside our own heads saying things to ourselves that we would never dream of saying to anybody we loved.

I am particularly bad at this. I will quite happily call myself a stupid cow because I’ve forgotten something, lost something, made a mistake, got distracted or done something in a way that has made my own life unnecessarily difficult. And I’m trying to stop. Because I wouldn’t speak to someone else like that. So why is it acceptable to speak to myself like that?

If I believe other people deserve kindness when they make mistakes, then perhaps I need to practise what I preach. And I don’t mean pretending that I never get things wrong. I absolutely do. I don’t mean telling myself that everything I do is wonderful. It isn’t.

And I don’t think it’s terribly helpful to replace:

I’m rubbish at knitting with I AM AN AMAZING KNITTER AND EVERYTHING I MAKE IS FABULOUS.

Especially when you’re sitting there looking at a jumper with one sleeve six inches longer than the other one.

I don’t think we need to tell ourselves things we don’t actually believe. We need something truer.

I haven’t worked this out yet.

I made a mistake. That doesn’t make me a bad knitter.

I know more than I used to.

I can ask somebody for help.

I can decide that this mistake really doesn’t matter to me.

I can also decide that it does matter to me and go back and fix it.

And perhaps most importantly:

Not knowing how to do something isn’t evidence that I can’t do it.

That little word yet does an awful lot of work.

“I can’t knit socks.” Yet.

“I don’t understand charts.” Yet.

“I can’t fix my own mistakes.” Yet.

It changes the whole thing, doesn’t it? It stops being a verdict on what sort of knitter you are and becomes a description of where you are today.

And I think that’s a really important part of knitting confidence.

It isn’t convincing yourself that you’re brilliant at everything. It certainly isn’t reaching some magical level of knitting where you never make another mistake, understand every pattern immediately and your knitting behaves itself at all times. I’ve been knitting far too long to believe that level exists.

It’s being able to look at where you are now without turning it into a judgement about who you are.

And for me there is something else in this too. One of the things I need to remind myself of is that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Not accidentally here. Not fundamentally defective. Not somehow a disappointment because I forgot something, messed something up, or didn’t manage to do all the things I thought I should have done that day.

And alongside that, my business coach Paula tells us something all the time that I have come to love:

You can do anything. But you can’t do everything.

I think both halves of that matter. You can learn the thing. You can change. You can try something new. You can become the person who does colourwork after twenty years of saying you can’t. You can ask for help. You can become more confident.

But you cannot do absolutely everything, all at once, perfectly, for everyone.

And perhaps some of the lies we need to stamp on are the ones that tell us we should be able to. You should know this already. You should have finished that. You should be better at this by now. You should be able to manage without help. You should be further ahead.

Hammer.

You might have spent twenty years being the person who “can’t do colourwork”. You don’t have to be her for the next twenty.

You might be somebody who has always needed someone else to help sort out your mistakes. That doesn’t mean you’ll always need help, and actually, asking for help while you’re learning isn’t a particularly terrible thing anyway.

You might be the person who never finishes anything.

Or you might eventually decide that you don’t particularly care about finishing everything, because actually casting something on, exploring an idea and seeing where it takes you is one of the things you enjoy about knitting.

That’s allowed too.

Because the point of getting rid of all those old rules isn’t to immediately replace them with a shiny new set of rules about how a Confident Knitter is supposed to behave. That would rather defeat the object. It’s to leave ourselves some room for possibility. To notice the voice when it appears. To ask whether it’s actually telling the truth. To answer it back. And, when necessary, to get the metaphorical hammer out.

So perhaps there’s another question to ask after Who told you that?

What are you going to tell yourself now?

And whatever the answer is, I think it needs to be something true. Something you can actually believe. Something you would be willing to say to a friend you loved. Something kind.

And something that doesn’t close the door on who you might become next.

Nessa

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