Big News About 2019!

Dear Crafters!

Without further ado, I'm blogging to let you know that The Craft Sessions' events will be on hiatus for 2019. This means no annual Craft Sessions retreat, and no Soul Craft in 2019.
 
For some of you this will come as a big surprise, but others of you will have felt it coming.
 
The Craft Sessions started as a total passion project – I simply wanted to bring people together who crafted for joy, and foster a love of hand making! And it worked. So many wonderful women have got to know one another through the incredible events we have run over the last six years. And I have been so grateful to be able to be there, and bear witness to the magic that happens when you bring people together around their shared passion.
 
You see the thing is that The Craft Sessions and Soul Craft have never been about building a business for me. I believe that connection is the secret sauce of life, and that hand making elevates our lives by giving us buoyancy. Sharing those beliefs at the events I've run has been so joyful and inspiring - but events also take a load of work and intention. I would never want to put on an event where I was just going through the motions. I think you can feel when an event has been put together with intention and care and love.
 
Some of you know I’ve been working on writing a book on how making impacts our wellbeing and elevates our lives – it’s my next passion project! (Or you could say it’s simply a continuation of this one.) Through running the events and talking with so many of you, both in person and online, I’ve realized the things I’ve been writing about, the ideas we have been in conversation about, don’t yet have broad understanding and acceptance in the wider world.
 
And so I’m on a mission – to promote hand making as a process that can elevate our lives by improving our wellbeing. And that means I have to finish the book I have been trying to write for the last few years. I believe that a hand making practice could be incredibly supporting and elevating to so many people, if only they knew why and how they could use it. These ideas deserve a much broader audience. These ideas could be of service to so many people.
 
The ideas contained in the book are too important to do a shitty job. A half-assed book isn’t going to cut it. And once written, I need to launch it, promote it and talk about it. I need to spread these ideas as widely and as loudly as I can.
 
The problem has been that when I run events I have a really easy opt-out for how I can spend my energy. For example, I worked on Soul Craft for nearly six months full time alongside the lovely Claire. Everything else in my life took a back seat, including blogging…. and I got to avoid the harder heart-work of writing the book by “having” to work on the festival. Realising that the festival was an incredibly joyful avoidance tactic on my part was a little painful, especially because it was so magical to be there, witness it, be part of it. Soul Craft was a total joy and all I'd hoped it would be.
 
This is why I need to take a year – I need to take a year to focus on getting my next passion project off the ground. This work deserves my full attention.
 
I promise there will be more events - more Soul Craft and Craft Sessions goodness! Just not any major ones in 2019.

I'm sincerely sorry to those of you who were excited about coming next year. I hate disappointing you!
 
The best way to keep up to date with all I’m doing is to join the mailing list. I am going to shift to a semi-monthly newsletter during this outwardly quieter period. And I’ll be back blogging every Friday - like in the old days :). There are already quite a few new posts up there from the last month or three, like Stash Less - For The Love Of Opportunity Cost , Making Shit Up, and Intentional Craft As True Comfort.

Please comment and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this, and I want to wholeheartedly thank you for your ongoing and passionate support.
 
Love
Felicia x

Sometimes Projects Just Fail

I made the sweater in the picture at the top about six months ago. And to me (and to all my family and my friends who were asked to judge it’s beauty) it was an abject failure. It’s actually much uglier in person than it is in pictures. The back is bright purple and there is a strip of light mauve on the bottom left panel. After these pictures were taken I actually redid the band one more time in a raspberry which improved it, but did not de-uglify it.

My (incredibly loving and supportive) fella actually said “Felicia, you make so many beautiful things. Please just throw that one in the bin and start again. It’s so ugly. You can’t inflict that on someone.”

Now the failure wasn’t for lack of trying. I tried, and I tried, to make it work. I pulled different parts out over and over again in an attempt to make a beautiful scrap sweater. And yet, I couldn’t get it to work. I ripped for joy, and tried again, and still no joy.

Now I’m a big fan of failing. Failing means I have tried something hard, something that is a stretch for me, and that I’ve hit the edges of what I’m capable of in that moment, under those circumstances. That’s not to say that I enjoy failure in the moment of the failure because I often don’t. In the moment I feel the prickles of shame, frustration or anger run up on the back of my neck….. But then I consciously make the choice to find the lessons and the joy in the failure.

It’s a choice I’ve practiced over many years. To consciously feel joy about being wrong. Because – and here is the magic part - when we have failed we have learnt something, and as such we are smarter than we once were. This is not a reframing where we are trying to make a pile of elephant dung be a cookie. But rather it is a cookie, that upon first glance can look like elephant dung. What’s failed is failed - it’s done - so why would we not look for the joy in learning the lessons we’ve learnt??

Failure is a teaching tool; we always learn from what we did, even if what we simply learnt is not to do the same thing again*. This process of try and fail and try again, can be incredibly satisfying and informative…. but this is conditional upon us being able to see failure for what it is. We need to take our cultural conditioning and our judgement out of the game. We need to learn to allow the failure not to mean anything about us. We need to not take our failures personally but rather that we see them as opportunities for growth.

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”

— Stephen McCranie

So back to the ugly cardy - even after all my years of knitting and combining colours and my effort I couldn’t make it work. And so I quit trying, and simply called it done. And I learnt some lessons.

I learnt that sometimes I can’t force it to work.

I learnt that I can’t really combine flat colours with heathers and make them sing in a way I would like.

I learnt that slightly different weights need to be combined using different stitches.

I learnt that sometimes an ugly yarn is simply an ugly yarn.

I learnt that while someone else may have been able to make it work, I couldn’t with what I know at this moment.

I learnt that to keep trying was just making me feel worse.

And so I quit. A noble and valid choice.

The back is this bright purple.

When I’ve talked about failure on the blog in the past I’ve had lovely kind humans commenting that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself – that I shouldn’t talk of myself in that way. That I shouldn’t call myself a failure and put myself down.

I find this line of thinking really interesting because I don’t see talking about a failure as putting myself down at all. I was calling my work in that instance a failure. I don’t see my failure as a reflection of my worth.

We have a cultural narrative about quitting that is tied up with the idea of failure. We don’t quit. We keep going. We don’t allow ourselves to fail (or to quit) because we must keep trying and trying until we succeed. Being quitters means that we are weak minded losers. Being quitters equates to being a failure. But this narrative is bullshit.

Me wearing the same cardy.

This wasn’t always my attitude towards failure. I’ve learnt how to better think about it through my personal experience with failure.

A long time ago I was once a young human who had always done extremely well at school. So well in fact that I managed to haul myself into a spot at one of Australia’s best universities. And it was there that I failed. More than once.

Failed! For the first time in my previously easy academic life, I failed, and I didn’t know what to do. School had come easy to me you see, and so when I failed I didn’t know quite what it meant. About me or my future or my potential. You see, I had never learnt about failure and I had never practiced failure. I had never thought about failure as something that was possible for me.

Figuring out how I thought about and understood failure took me years to muddle through.

In retrospect it’s easy to see what happened, why I failed. I had just moved to the big city by myself at 17. I was a little lonely and totally unclear what I wanted. And one of my clever techniques when I was afraid of failure and uncertain was “avoidance” as a life strategy. And so, when I knew that I hadn’t done the work I needed to to pass the exam, rather than pulling out of the subject (as that would be admitting failure) I simply didn’t show up to the exam.

Yep.

Ahhh the craziness of youth. Anyway after failing and failing again, I decided to take a year off uni and reset. I took my full time job at the local supermarket and for a year I clocked in and clocked off for my 40 hour week. And I got very very bored.

So I quit. Again. By this time I was 20 years old with no plans, no degree and now no job. Some phone calls to my family lead me to understand that there was some :-) concern about the quitting and the failure and the uncertainty. There was some suggestion that the quitting in itself was a failure.

And yet to me it became clear that it wasn’t about failure or quitting but rather it was an opportunity for growth. I was the kind of person that learns best by doing. I couldn’t learn anything about what I wanted without trying all the things. Trying fumbling around with uni studying things I didnt enjoy, working full time in a supermarket,, trying traveling with no money, trying blagging my way into jobs in cities I didn’t know. Without the failing and the trying and the quitting my life wouldn’t look how it does now. All of these experiences were critically informative learning.

The ugly cardy went to a good home where it is very loved it’s owner. It’s owner isn’t the lovely kid in the photo. The kid in the photo said “oh Felicia - that is a very ugly cardigan”. Bless x

As Greg McKeown says in Essentialism, we quit things all the time. We must quit, and we must fail if we are to allow ourselves to grow and evolve. For example we aren’t still doing ballet or learning the organ or sucking our thumbs, like we did when we were small. We aren’t still annoying the shit out of our brother, and taking jokes way to far, as we aren’t 10 years old anymore. We are also not 20 or 30 or 40. And as such I am no longer a ballet dancer, a ceramicist, a land surveyor, a GIS practicioner, a checkout chick, a smoker, a big social drinker, a super-annoying big sister, a white-liar, a market researcher, a worrier, a non-exerciser or someone who is terrified of heights. We’ve allowed ourselves to evolve through our failure and our quitting. And sometimes through our success.

I have tried and failed and practiced and got better and tried and failed again. And that is how I have learnt to appreciate failing. Because each time I fail - especially in my making - I learn something that I couldn’t have learnt without the failure. The potential for failure is about butting up against the edges of what works so we can see what doesn’t.

Sometimes failing is the only way we can learn what we need to learn. About life and about craft.

Playing in the middle is safe and comfortable and comforting but it isn’t where the magic is. Think about the works of craft that you admire; the things you have made, and the things other people have made, and think about what you love. For me the things I love most are the things that surprise me, the things that shoudn’t work but do. The things that break the rules, and in breaking them come up with new rules. This kind of craft can only happen when we try to butt up against the edges of what works and maybe even cross those lines. And to do that we must step into the uncertainty of not knowing and accept the possibility of total failure.

For me? My most cherished makes are those that I have made by sitting in uncertainty, which means I need actively practicing working with my potential to fail. In order to make the projects that sing we have to also make projects that suck.

How do you feel about failure? Is it something you flirt with? You abore? Or you roll around in? Have you got better at it over time. Please tell me your stories!

Felicia x 

* Like cutting out fabric after two glasses of wine late at night. A lesson I need to relearn at least once a year - which has taught me another important and useful lesson about myself. I’m a woman who needs reminding.

Stash Less - For The Love Of Opportunity Cost

I've fallen off the Stash Less wagon more times I can count, in more ways than I can count. Each time I fall, I simply try to get more aware about why, and not let wagon falling allow me to justify returning to my old ways. I remember that changing any behaviour or pattern takes practice…. and that wagon falling is not an excuse for denial of the truth of unhealthy stashing (ie. hoarding).

I got tagged in a post on instagram recently where someone mentioned that since reading Stash Less they now always buy with a project in mind…. however, sometimes, the beautiful skeins sneak their way in to her bag. Her sweet little comment was "I don't know how?". Which I totally get.

Someone else on that same instagram post stated that even when she purchases special skeins, she doesn’t stash them. Instead she uses them up, as she would rather have special finished objects, than special skeins. What a lovely thought.

Which got me to thinking why I sometimes in the past have struggled to do the same thing. And how it can still be a problem for me. That said I've got better at it, in fact one of the breakthrough moments of Stash Less was when I started using my pretty stuff rather than simply hoarding it. But this is sometimes still an issue for me, and so many of you I suspect. Using the "special".

Sometimes my attachment to the “special” fabric/yarn leading me to purchase something new, rather than using a fabric I love that would be perfect for the project at hand. A weird trick of the mind not allowing me to make the obvious choice.

What happens to me is that I fall prey to the siren song of rolling around in Opportunity Cost; the knowledge that if we use the fabric to make A, then we can’t use it to make B or C or K. And so I enter into a kind of opportunity cost paralysis where I don’t use my very favourite things, the things that would give me the most pleasure to wear…. just in case. Just in case a better idea comes along.

The land of Opportunity Cost is a beautiful place to wander around in. It is full of shiny infinite possibility, each one fully realised in our minds eye. We can see ourselves wearing X and Y and Z, and looking smashing in them. Our future selves joyous in the three different dresses we have made ourselves from our single length of our favourite fabrics.

While using opportunity cost to weigh up our different options is supremely useful, wandering round in opportunity-cost-land is just wandering around in our imagination. You see opportunity-cost-land is a trickster land, a land of distortion. We can get so tangled in the beautiful possibilities that we “decide” that we can’t choose one option - because to choose one would be to deny the others the possibility of every having a life.

Not choosing means we are left with a length of fabric on a shelf or yarn in a (plastic*) box.

Rolling around in opportunity cost is like eating popcorn. It looks like a whole bowl full of goodness but even as you eat it, you know that it never really fills you up. The choice we are making is deciding by not deciding. Denying ourselves the opportunity of getting actual nurturing and joy from a using a thing we made from a fabric/yarn we love.

In contrast, to pick option, to use our special stash, is to acknowledge the opportunity cost of making, and do it anyway. By making a choice we are giving up opportunity and possibility, and we humans don't like giving up stuff. Especially not possibility. It's one of our favourite things.

Choosing is risky - because we might not love the outcome. And it’s brave - not because we are using the fabric/yarn (because lets get real, unless it is our mothers wedding gown, it really is just yarn and just fabric) - but because we are consciously choosing to outsmart our own programming. And that often takes thought, determinations, practice and guts.

I still hold on to special skeins and special fabrics. On occasion I”ve held onto them so long I no longer love them, which is simply a ridiculous tragedy. I’ve held on to them thinking about the many and varied possible projects they would be perfect for - and in doing so have wasted my actual opportunity to love them as a object I could interact with and enjoy.

I’m going to keep practicing how I want to live, and hopefully in time will do this better.

Is this a struggle for you?

Felicia x

*Bloody moths.

Making shit up.

Years ago I made a quilt that wasn’t quite right - and I think I’m about to make another. You see in craft there are many norms. We call these norms ‘rules’ and they are often based on tradition. We hear that the right way to do things is X and if we’ve done it kinda Y-like we may be “lucky” enough to be informed of the error of our ways. And sometimes that can be useful - maybe we didn’t know about X way of doing things. And maybe X would work better. But sometimes we get so caught up with X that we forget it’s even possible to think up Y. And Y could be just what we needed.

I’m right in the middle of doing my middle kids quilt and gee-willakers I’m loving it. It is a true joy project - the process is magically calming and exquisitely sensory. The hand-quilting part of making a quilt is a basically a menial task with all the non-thinking mindfullness that the menial entails. Plus I get to look at the pretty quilt while I’m doing it. And I think that the hand quilting I’ve chosen to do - which I was really uncertain about - is enhancing the look of the quilt delightfully.

To make the process even more joyful I’ve (rudely) taken over the whole of our dining table for the duration, and am making us eat dinner in our brekkie spot. Which means the quilt is always out and ready, so I can do a stitch or two here and there throughout the day. As projects go this one has been totally joy filled once I got over my stories and my fear. I really had to sit in the fear that it wouldn’t work in order to take a step forward.

I handquilted the star to make it the focus of the quilt. And as I’m just over half way through quilting the star, I’m naturally starting to think about how to quilt the rest of the quilt. Outside the star the rest of the quilt is a dark denim chambray, which I really want to keep as a background rather than bringing it into the design….which brings me to the subject of today’s post which is “Making shit up”.

Years ago when I made the spot quilt, I broke with quilting tradition - or at least how I was taught to make a quilt. You see I was trying to show different techniques of quilting for a workshop, so decided to put all the techniques together. I used hand quilting as a feature in the middle of the quilt, and then for the rest of the quilt I machine quilted it. To the best of my knowledge a half-hand-quilted/half-machine-quilted quilt really isn’t a thing. I don’t think there is a special category at the quilting show for this particular mishmash of techniques. To the best of my knowledge this breaks with tradition.*

But after living with the spot quilt for many years I really adore it this hand/machine combination. You see the middle part of the quilt is hand quilted which gives the quilt a tactility and a warmth that a fully machine quilted quilt often lacks (in my opinion!) AND the machine quilted part of the quilt has a certain fluidity that is lacking in the more densely hand quilted spot. This means a cosy quilt with the benefits of both sports - machine and hand.

While the lovely Mary Jane Mucklestone was in town I hosted a workshop with her in Sydney, and one of the things she talked about was the idea of tradition, and how it is not always as traditional as we might think. MJ is a wealth of knowledge and history of Fair Isle and Shetland knitting - she’s even written books about it! And so what she said surprised me - which was, that traditions are incredibly practical, that there are reasons why the crafters make the choices they do, but also that sometimes in some places, and some families, they do things differently based on their preference. For example some people sew their ends in, some weave in ends as they go, some tie knots and others (shock and horror) do nothing but leave their ends dangling. MJ spoke of how tradition isn’t set in stone, and that she is often surprised by the methodologies people use.

While traditions have much to teach us, we can sometimes stuck on the idea that they are the only ways of doing things and this is a problem. At workshops and festivals and craft fairs and shows, I’ve heard many a lovely human tell another lovely human, that they are doing it wrong. And maybe they are. Maybe in that case there is a better way of doing something, or a way more in line with tradition…. and yet I also want to put my hand up for the idea that we should engage with making shit up regularly. Making shit up to see if we can find a better way, a more practical way of doing something. Making shit up because tradition is not set in stone. Making shit up because traditions evolve. Making shit up because it’s fun and we like the result better.

Every technique was made up at sometime by someone. Whether it was made up yesterday by you, or 150 years ago by women on a far off isle, all options are equally valid. Neither option gets to exclusively own credibility - not the traditional method, nor the new and shiny idea.

Our craft is not a performance for others, but rather it is a lived experience. And as such, all that matters, is that you are pleased with the results you get from the method you have chosen.

I wrote a while back about Breaking the Rules in craft and how often the “rules” are dictated by the values or the circumstances of the people who made them up. For these quilts - I initially broke them to demonstrate techniques for a workshop but now after living with it, and loving it, I think it might be my thing. This beautiful star quilt is going to also be a mish-mash quilt. A hand quilted star with a machine quilted background - just the thing to top it off,don’t you think?

Do you enjoy making shit up? Or are you tradition all the way? Have you invented a technique like mish-mash quilting? If so I’d love to hear about it…..

Felicia x

*Maybe this is a thing in some part of the world I don’t know about? Or is part of some beautiful tradition that I have never seen? I really don’t know that much about the history of quilting. I’d love to hear if you know of a place that does this mish-mash.

Intentional Craft As True Comfort

So this week, and last week, and the week before that we have had stuff going on. And the week before that. And I keep thinking “as soon as this next thing is done there will be space” but there just isn’t. The space I’m magically hoping will appear, is filled with a crashed car, or a guy turning up to put in a skylight, or a kid with some asthma, and a partner with a crook back. And a birthday and a school play and a school fair and the vacuum cleaner blowing up.

It feels necessary to say it’s all good - we are all good-ish shape at the moment and for that I am very grateful. It’s simply life daily with nothing earth shattering, nothing too intense, but the one thing after another is seemingly a little relentless in it’s ongoingness.

Through it all I’m making. Sometimes joyously, but often impatiently, twitchily, frustratedly or late at night when everyone is asleep. Making as a way to claw back a bit of time, a bit of agency, a bit of control. To find a bit of me.

But…. some of this clawing back is a fuck you. Fuck you to a lack of space. Fuck you to demands and to a lack of freedom and just generally to responsibilities. It is the type of making that is essentially screaming at the universe “you don’t own meeee” or “you can’t take my freeedoooomm”.

Now to state the obvious, this isn’t always the most helpful kind of making. It’s not helpful because often when things are this relentless, when there is this much on, my making is actually making things worse.

As one of my midwives once said to me “parenting is all about surrendering to what is, rather than what you would like it to be…. and then once you have surrendered, you will be asked to surrender again”.

I felt mildly outraged when I heard her say this, but 13 years on I know this is true because I’ve lived it. And I believe that it applies more widely than just parenting. Surrender means we are telling ourselves the truth about the reality of what is before us, rather than shouting “NO” at the universe with our fingers in our ears.

My lovely friend and I had a 90 second conversation tonight, in the midst of kids and violins and renovation dust, about making under these conditions. She said that for her making doesn’t work when there is life overwhelm as she finds that the distraction of craft, the desire to do it, pulls her away from what she needs to do to be present. The call of the wild meaning that if she engages she won’t be giving the life stuff the attention it needs to do it well. She said that the lure of craft can make things worse for her.*

This made me think of Brene Brown’s new book “Dare To Lead” I’ve been listening to. In it she speaks of the difference between numbing behaviours, that we use to take the edge off, and the true comfort, that we all deserve and need to consciously make space for. This distinction really resonated to me and made me think more consciously about what I do to take the edge off.

Brene said common numbing behaviours include all the usuals - drinking, smoking, food, internet, instagram, shopping….. But the one she doesn’t mention, my personal favourite is craft.

I use craft to take the edge off all the time. I use it to take the edge off when the kids are fighting in the car. I use it to take the edge off when I’m overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do. I use it to take the edge off when I’m too exhausted to sleep and just want a moment for myself. I use it to take the edge off when I can’t face cooking one more healthy nutritious family meal.

But while taking the edge off feels OK in the moment it doesn’t improve my situation because it’s a numbing behaviour. I’m using craft as avoidance of the trickier parts of my life. Which leads to more overwhelm.

Now there comes a time in every rebellious crafters life, when they have to admit that their crafting is in a place where it’s more fuck you than life elevating. And that in order to live the life one truly wants, a good life, one must take stock and make some better choices.

So what to do?

First up, I inevitably need to pay attention and get the basics covered. Sleep? 9.30 bedtime (even though I resist like a MF.) Water? Good food? Probiotic? Sensible list making to avoid procrastination? Consciously checking the amount of instagram/internet/podcasts I’m consuming? This list is always my starting point because even if I get two or three of them sorted things look up.

And then I look at my making. This is key, because my making is my main tool kit for improving my wellbeing. Not meditation or exercise or gratitude - but engaging with process of making objects with my hands. Praise be.

Making elevates my life, but in order allow it to work it’s magic, I have to get intentional about the kinds of craft I’m engaging with. No numbing craft, no shouting at the universe craft. I need to make time to fill the tank with engaging craft, meaningful craft, comforting craft, joyful craft.

I’ve been here enough times that I know the pattern. In reality filling my tank looks a little like this….

1. I choose meaning. What are projects I can do that are meaningful as objects but are easy to make?

2. I get simple, really simple. All crazy plans for big projects get chucked temporarily and I choose meaningfully simple projects that involve little headspace but provide maximum joy.

3. I try to have two simple knitting projects on the go so that if I get to a tricky bit in one I can pick up the other. No cables, no colourwork, no muss, no fuss.

4. I always have some small portable project that I can take with me to use as my “waiting” time. This avoids me heading to my phone for my dose of dopamine (which does me no good) and instead offers me a way of including more comfort in my day.

5. I have a few simple sewing (Simple Sewing 101 style) projects lined up and ready to do one seam at a time. There are three in my basket cut out right now. Things that I could make with shut eyes but that will be incredibly joyous to wear.
   In tricky times I try to ensure my sewing projects are things that will either have great utility for the kids (as they embody satisfaction, connection and meaning for me) or will make me feel special when I wear them. Ideally they should make me want to do strutting.

6. I dedicate time to it in the middle of the overwhelm, consciously and with purpose. I make time to craft - I schedule it.
   My mum always said “noone has time, they make time”. And I make time to craft. But when there is the overwhelm and the ongoing-ness I do it in teeny tiny blocks. 10 and 20 minutes blocks - like one would use meditation - that I dish out to myself like a daily probiotic.
   And although this tiny amount of time sounds like it wouldn’t be enough, it often is. There is that saying that states we humans overestimate how much we can get done in a day, but underestimate how much we can get done in a year but working on something regularly. Tiny blocks make a huge difference - to my project and my well being.

I often use this kind of making as a reward - once I’ve done my writing and my housework and my kid stuff and the shopping and the life admin, then I get 20 minutes before school pickup that is mine. Guilt free eggs-first style. Craft for joy.

For me true comfort craft in busy times needs to be scheduled and clear and filled with intention. It involves me consciously making a choice to avoid FU craft. It means that I’m choosing surrender, but it also means choosing self care.

This very afternoon I’m sitting down with the lovely Martine after Crossfit, and we are dedicating an hour to friendship and true comfort craft. As of Monday all her time will be taken up again, and so we will be attempting to create a piece of clothing that she can wear into the next three months of busy. An artefact of the making process that reminds her to choose true comfort for herself, when she can. To remind her of her agency, her capacity, her skill and her potential. To remind her that she can create beauty and carry that beauty with her, giving buoyancy to her spirit in the middle of the muddle that is life.

Do you shift your type of craft in the middle of life overwhelm?

Felicia x

*I’m paraphrasing and could have interpreted her words totally wrong….. but regardless, what I heard meant I wrote this post so I’m going to call it artistic license? :)

**I know that sometimes the overwhelm itself makes this impossible.