Frogging

It’s a strange term and I’m really not sure where it came from but it is term used by crocheters when they rip out work that they have done. In my head I have the terrible 1980s song by Orange Juice , ‘Rip it up and start again,’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETAOp2yiMc0 playing as some sort of ear worm. However earlier in the week I found myself in the position of frogging my work. I had purchased a pattern because I’d fallen in love with it. It was going well to begin with but then it started to look wrong. I carried on and finished the piece. Unfortunately I really wasn’t happy with the finished result so I decided to undo the entire piece in order that I could start again. My husband asked me whether I was sure that I wanted to do that but I said that I was certain. So after several days of working on the project it became several balls of yarn again.

There are some parallels here with my life. I have said that one of the things that I will use this blog to discuss is mental health and now is as good a time as any. In some respects I engaged in frogging my life when we moved to France. In November 2019 I went down with a severe cold which meant that I needed to use an asthma inhaler just to walk a short distance. My GP was convinced that my chest was clear and could find nothing wrong. By January I couldn’t face leaving the house and I certainly couldn’t have gone into work. I couldn’t even talk about work without having a panic attack. Even now I do not want to engage in conversations about my area of expertise. The start of 2020 was not the time to suffer with any form of mental illness. I was put on a waiting list for counselling however when the lock down came the mental health team contacted me and told me that they were being diverted to work else where in the health service and so no counselling would be occurring in the foreseeable future.

I began using my time to craft, many crafting hobbies are considered to be excellent for your mental health and allowing time for mindfulness. I engaged in crocheting, knitting, up-cycling old furniture as well as creating decorative pieces for the home. As the months went by I began to feel better, though not well enough to return to work. The mention of work could still bring on a panic attack. As time went by I realised that I did not want to get better in order to go back into the situation that I had been in and to risk becoming ill again.

I decided to look into the possibility of taking early retirement on the grounds of ill health. This was not a painless process by any stretch of the imagination. A long story short someone decided that at some point in the next 12 years I might be fit to do an aspect of my job again. So you guessed it, I did not meet the criteria for taking retirement on the grounds of ill health. On the plus side I am of an age where I could look at taking a reduced pension. So with that in mind we did our sums.

As you will be aware we made the decision that it might be possible. So now we live a much reduced lifestyle. We have frogged it and are doing something new. It’s not a panacea and there are many challenges to doing what we have done. Nevertheless life is so much better than it could have been, if we hadn’t made a change.

So if you frog something you take a risk that you won’t create something as good as you previously had. What happens though if you create something better? So until tomorrow here’s to frogging…