Today’s exquisite crochet Mandalas for Marinke come to us from Pauline of Making Polly.
Pauline shares:
“I am a mum of 2 small children and am from Scotland. I am a qualified architect but have been (mostly) a SAHM for a few years. I love my little family but with being a full time mum and the one who looks after the home, at times I feel I have lost my identity. Being creative, especially with crochet, helps me to rest and just be me again!”
I love that she has shared this because I know it’s something that a lot of mothers go through. In those first years after you have a baby, you aren’t always “me” but are often “mom” and it takes time to figure out where the “me” is in the mom-baby world. And of course that changes again and again over time as the kids get older. Crafting can be an easy way to get back some of your self-identity.
Pauline also included this note:
“For Wink, such a creative soul and such a tragedy the world has lost you. May you be happy and at peace now!”
These two crochet mandalas were made using Wink’s mandala patterns.
Pauline had actually already started the spoke mandala before hearing about Wink’s death. She’s written about this on her blog. She shares in part:
“I started (badly may I add) working on it in February. It then became a work in progress (WIP) that was put away and forgotten about. My usual response when my creations are much less than my idea of perfect – get angry, hide it away and forget it. When I heard the sad news about Marinke it felt right to take out this WIP I was hiding away.”
For the depression awareness portion of today’s post, I want to share the thought that it’s easier to heal when you love yourself through depression rather than hating yourself (although getting there can be so hard!) Erin Schulthies, who has gone through more than a decade of treatment for depression, shares:
“In the long list of recovery tips I could share with you, the most important thing I’ve learned is that you can’t hate yourself out of being depressed. It can really stand between you and your recovery. Hating yourself is no way to accomplish anything, especially when it comes to recovering from depression.”
This photo is from @makingpolly
Then she adds:
“For years I thought, “Yeah, yeah, loving myself is a bunch of cheesy crap.” But do you know what? As soon as I started even being a little bit nicer to myself, I started to get better from my depression. It didn’t happen overnight; I had to go slowly. First I started removing words like “should” from my vocabulary. I started reminding myself that everyone makes mistakes and that it’s impossible to be perfect. I started tolerating myself before I liked myself, and when I liked myself, it was only sometimes. “I’m okay at art, I guess,” I thought. The more I practiced liking myself, the easier it became.”
Self-loathing in depression may be a neurological thing. However, you can learn to work with it. It’s a form of self-bullying and we have to work to end all bullying!
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