november diary | job hunting and crying over quilts

and other things that are filling the time

I took my knitting down to the beach this afternoon. I rode the old postie, picked up some fish and wedges, and put them in the milk crate that is fastened to the back with zip ties.

The wind was picking up, as it does at this time of day. I laid my towel under the sinking sun and knitted until it was too windy to continue, and then I rode home.

~

It feels as though time is slipping through my fingers like oil, and I’m trying to grab hold of it, so that when people ask, I can hold out my hands and give them something to show for all of these hours and days. At the moment, all I have to offer are slimy palms.

~

I have been trying to learn to sew, and I thought that the best way to learn would be to sew a quilt with hundreds of 2.5x2.5” squares. After two days of committed effort, I bailed on the project. I cried. I shed real tears about it on the couch.

“Oh my god,” I wailed to my boyfriend. “I need a fucking job!”

~

I haven’t worked for five months, in a bid to recover from 10 years of self-employment, political campaigning and the stressful process of selling my business. It has been a remarkable time, but it has also felt a bit like getting off the train at a station in central Australia, knowing that the next one probably won’t be for a while, and that it’s going to be travelling some place new, some place I can’t quite imagine.

There are questions, of course. Will the next train have space for me? Do I have anything of value to offer? Do I even want to get on a train? Why not lie down here, under the stars, and stay like this until it’s time to die?

~

My friend texts me one afternoon. This liminal space is always so rich with self-discovery. Enjoy it.

I AM RUNNING OUT OF TIME, I want to shout. The self has not been discovered!

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I have a job interview. It is with a recruitment agency that has been hired to manage the onslaught of applicants. It is the first formal job interview I have had in ten years. I am asked questions like How Would Your Friends Describe You In Three Words and What Is A Work Example You Are Most Proud Of And Why? I look at the perfectly kind woman through the screen and think, oh my god, is this the next train? Please no.

~

2026 is a blank canvas. 2026 can be what I want it to be. I can bring forth everything that I hope for in my life in 2026.

~

I started Margaret Atwood’s memoir this week. In the introduction, she writes, ‘Of course I have one [a body double]. Every writer does. The body double appears as soon as you start writing. How can it be otherwise? There’s the daily you, and then there’s the other person who does the actual writing. They aren’t the same.’

Most of my Substack followers do not know me in real life, and I like that. I have all of these internet relationships with people who are friends with my double. Sometimes I like my double better than the person who occupies physical space. But sometimes I hate her and hide from her too. She catastrophises everything! And she is so much sadder.

~

A dream, recently:
I am driving backwards and I cannot see where I am going and then there is a collision and I am flying through the air, flying through windshield after windshield like the pages of a book.

I do not land like a pancake of blood and flesh. I land, instead, at the top of a stairwell.

I know, almost immediately, that it is the Stairwell of Sadness.

The Stairwell is very busy tonight. There is a woman with a walking stick, cradling a hedgehog. There is a woman with a baby, and a punk with a half-shaved head. There is a band playing at the bottom of the stairwell and I am standing on the top landing, watching them.

An old friend walks over. I haven’t seen him in a long time. He is happy to see me and we embrace.

“Will you stay here, with me?” he asks. He is barefoot, and his t-shirt is moth-bitten, and we stand hip to hip while the music plays. I don’t think he has cut his hair in years, and his feet are still sandy.

I know he is lonely like me, but I shake my head.

“I don’t want to be in the Stairwell,” I say. “We will never leave. This will become a place of self-indulgence for us.”

I put my hand on his shoulder to say goodbye and walk away and out of the dream.

~

I saw my first grey hair last week. The light caught it as I was turning my face in the mirror. I reached out to inspect it. My first thought was finally!. And then I felt smug. Like the beauty industry didn’t beat me on this one. My body is finally catching up to how I feel.

~

It is almost December. I will spend the month hiking and thinking about 2026. I have a lot of ideas about the art I want to make. I have enrolled at university again because I miss the external accountability of formal study. I have saved a few jobs that look interesting. I am trying to stop trying so hard, and to allow this space of rest to breathe three uninterrupted breaths.

🎧 Adrienne Lenker’s Tiny Desk
📚 Margaret Atwood’s A Book of Lives and Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?
👩‍🌾 Harvesting zucchinis and parsley, netting up the berry patch, ordering more garden beds, weeding.
🧶 Knitting myself PetiteKnit’s Olga Sweater, weaving tea-towels and sewing a wholecloth baby quilt.