Well, I have decided that the left gauntlet is fucking finished.

The thumb became a horrific nightmare of epic proportions and I frogged it and re-tried it so many times that the poor yarn split in some directions I didn’t even know was possible.

When it was done, I had done only one row of ribbing, which isn’t ribbing at all, and after I cast it off I discovered that actually I’d backtracked and I did one needle of ‘ribbing,’ a needle of nothing, and then a needle with two rib rows.

“You have to be done with this,” whispered my darling coworker C who is my knitting pal.

OH I’M DONE WITH YOU, THUMB I hollered.

There are so many metaphors I can write about — this blog seems to be turning all knitting into a goddamned metaphor — about being ‘good enough’ and understanding when you are not perfect but you are done with therapy at least for now (I’m, um, NOT) and blah blah blah.

But I’ll just say this: that thumb is going to bug me every damn day I wear it, but looking at it I will know that I wrestled the truly destructive part of my perfectionism to the ground and pinned it there with a horrifying hank of confusing half-felted yarn and a pair of double-tipped needles.

*

As for knowing when you’re done with therapy — I have reached one of those  plateaus where your day-to-day is too stressful to be able to handle doing EMDR but you are still quite tidily insane and so I KNOW I can’t quit now but fuckif I can see an end anywhere on the horizon.

Maybe someday I will look at that thumb and smile and be like THAT’S RIGHT I FINISHED THAT FUCKER NO MATTER HOW CRAPPY IT WAS and then it will stop bugging me and instead become an emblem of how much I’ve grown but that day is pretty far ahead.

I’m fairly certain I’ve been doing therapy with EMDR for six years, at least. And I am so tired, but it has broken open a part of me that I don’t want to brick in again and so the only way through this is forward.

I need a nap.