couch bound

If you’ve been around here or my insta for a while, you might know I have a reputation for ridiculous injuries that are just a little bit extra. It is, admittedly, a well earned reputation – burning my foot on a heat gun at midnight the night before camp is a particular highlight (lowlight?). I think though, I have outdone myself this time. The scene: two small steps. The activity: coming down those two steps looking for the cat. The result: 3.5 hours in A&E, soft tissue/ligament damage, moonboot, crutches.

Only I could wind up with restricted mobility by coming down two steps that I’ve been traversing multiple times a day every day for the past three years. Far out Brussel Sprout. A week on, I’m doing a lot better and can hobble around with varying levels of discomfort, but by far the biggest injury at this point is to my pride. To say I feel like a goose is an understatement.

The first couple of days I was very limited on the weight bearing (aka I couldn’t), so I played up the sympathy points with the kids, getting them to bring me snacks and projects. By day three, I was feeling trapped and frustrated, with a side serve of executive functioning freeze. If I couldn’t move around and do stuff as and when I wanted to, then I couldn’t be bothered even doing the stuff I wanted to do. With the benefit of (a little bit of) time, I can see I actually didn’t do too badly.

I managed to direct a basic kind of school from the couch, even if we couldn’t do the fun active stuff we normally would. The mister decided my laid up status meant I had no reasonable excuse to not mend a hole in his pants. Unfortunately I had to concede he had a point, and mended them, but moaned and carried on the whole time just to remind him – mending is not sewing! I got my two big projects – 100 Days of Rectangles and Project365 – up to date, even if my photos did require a bit of extra creativity to make it work on one leg! I cast off a second sock and cast on a skirt. On Pinterest I’d found a cute crochet design without a pattern, that I reverse engineered and then swatched. While I had my yarn bag out, I decided to wind the balls into cakes to try and tidy it up a bit.

I’d had big plans for computer work, and I did get a bit of it done – two different patterns drafted up ready for photos and formatting. There was a little bit of blogging catch up, but not as much as I’d hoped. Even the podcast editing I could have done a stack on, and yet I was editing it the day before it dropped like usual. I read a bit, scrolled a bit, chatted a bit, got annoyed at myself a lot. The more mobile I get though the more mojo I feel coming back. The skirt is into the second of five repeats. My photos are (almost) up to date. I managed half a book last night.

It’s interesting to me how interconnected my motivation and productivity are, almost in an inverse relationship. To be motivated and then become productive is a normal thing that normal people do. I find it tends to work the opposite for me. If I’m not productive, or like in this case, am restricted in what I can do, I become less motivated to do anything creative. Conversely, the more I do, the more motivated I feel to keep making. After a week of not doing much, I jumped on a call Friday morning with Car – we’re done recording the current series of our podcast but it’s become such a part of our routine that we’ll often jump on just to chat and art together. In that hour, I did more than I’d done the four days prior. A rectangle. Part of a mini class. A Lino cut. Some knitting. Then once the creative dam was broken, I was back in the swing of it, and have been powering through since.

I even managed to tidy my ottoman storage box and reset it to its original neat and tidy state. Clearly the mojo is back and ready to craft…what should I fill the box up with first?