These two lovely crochet motifs were contributed to the Mandalas for Marinke project by Patty Davis who shares that she has been diagnosed bipolar for many years and is still trying every day. She adds:
“Crafting is a part of my life. It accepts me.”
She shared a crochet pentagon in great bold primary colors and a crochet circle-in-a-square that Wink would have loved.
Patty shares:
“When I found Wink’s web spot, my mouth dropped open. So many colors! She could make sense of color; I loved that about her. To me at times colors are too big … they overwhelm me. But not Wink. She made sense of them. She had them speak to her.”
Patty adds:
“I will miss Wink. I will miss her creative being. I wish I was better with words. I’m better with yarn. She taught me that. I have to crochet every day or I feel I have wasted time. Even my dogs lay quietly when I crochet; they know it brings me peace.
I will miss Wink, but I will not forget how she touched my soul. XOXO.”
For the depression awareness portion of today’s post, I wanted to share an interesting article over at Science of Us called The Problem of How to Be Depressed Online. It asks the difficult, deep question:
“How do we decide which aspects of our life to curate for online presentation, and how do we communicate with and relate to people who are much happier, or much sadder, than we are?”
Being able to share ourselves online is a wonderful thing. I know that opening up to people about my own depression and letting people online know when I’m having a hard time really helps me find and feel support. I also believe that it sometimes helps others, by giving them permission to open up as well, by offering a space where it’s okay to say that you’re having a hard time.
At the end of each day, I post to my social accounts sharing my accomplishments of the day. There are usually five or six things on the list, things that I’m proud of having gotten done or that were small joys in my day. Sometimes my day was terrible but I still share the positive things because it’s important to me to remember that something good happened anyway. (More about this here.) But people who don’t know why I do this can get the misconception that my life is perky and perfect and happy or at least easy despite that I also share about depression. What we share online doesn’t always, maybe doesn’t even often, reflect our whole selves.
A key thing highlighted in the Science of Us article is that people tend to be drawn towards the kind of posts that reflect what they themselves are currently feeling. So when you’re feeling down, you tend to want to read posts by others who are down or who relate to that and when you’re happy those very same posts turn you off. I think that tends to be true for me, although I have to muse on it a bit more to really get a full sense of why it is. Still, I thought it was an interesting perspective, one that has many implications not the least of which, for me, is that there is a time and place for each of us to share our current thoughts and feelings because someone out there is going through something similar and needs to hear it.
