Just dropped a stitch, another fucking stitch, and I’ve lost count of how many stitches are in this row, and I didn't stick around to learn just how many rows of these little stitches I have to make until I have a cotton coffin. I sigh and look at my phone. I want to pick it up. I want to pick it up so bad that my hand twitches and unravels my last few stitches. This is progress. My hands are occupied with locally sourced yarn and a steel crochet hook, not a mini computer powered by blood-soaked minerals-- I can feel good about this. I should feel good about this, I think. I’m above the deep insecurities and unrequited feelings mucking up my insides. I'm unplugged and untapped. Living the dream. I put down the crochet and picked up the clay. I rooted around my closet for my craft crate, knowing I would need a full day of distraction. I begin mashing the hard brick, slapping the dimensionless white slab onto my desk. Barely budging, I hit it with my fist hard and harder until I realized the clay was flat and I could hear wood splintering beneath it. Fuck him, I thought, and the other ones too. 

My phone is on ‘do not disturb, yet I know no one has texted me. For the past few weeks, my hobby has been arguing and begging for attention. I swear I was just reading and writing, and now I’m compulsively opening FindMy every few minutes. These people didn’t even exist for me a few weeks ago. Now they’re all I think about. I’m a black woman; nothing will end well for me unless I make it so myself. I can’t make a man act right, but I can sculpt an ashtray from air-dry clay. All that time spent reading Bell Hooks essays for nothing, I clearly haven’t learned a damn thing about love. She told me, “We cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care,” and I failed to heed her lesson. This man telling me he only disrespected me because he cares about me whipped me back to my childhood, reminding me of a certain weight I forgot I carried. A key component of love is trust, and I can’t seem to trust a soul, not even myself. So I isolate. I go back to my hobbies, crafts, and cave. There is simply no balance. If I grew up in a paradoxical household, how can I navigate a polarized concept like love? All words are meaningless, and all behavior is weird, arguably always needing scrutiny. 
 
It’s not as though Hooks didn’t address this either. “Raised in a family in which aggressive shaming and verbal humiliation coexisted with lots of affection and care, I had difficulty embracing the term 'dysfunctional’”, she says, recounting her own childhood. “Since I felt and still feel attached to my parents and siblings, proud of all the positive dimensions of our family life, I did not want to describe us by using a term that implied our life together had been all negative or bad”. I willed myself to only see the positive in my childhood. I used to claim I would never accept these types of abuses in my adult life; I would seek true love and find it. Affection and care would sustain me, and for a while they did; Until I began subconsciously working against myself and for my unprocessed childhood. I took my role as “dysfunctional”, never placing importance on my early interactions. Instead, I ran with the title and brought it to all my future relationships. 
 
It’s a double-edged sword: love and hate. Both sides sliced me severely, and I still hold on with tattered palms. My dad calls me dumb, then takes me to buy new shoes: I love him. My mom lets him berate me and proceeds to hand me cash: I love her. Perhaps I’m a commodity, to be pacified by loose change and bows on empty presents. I’m still smiling when my screen lights up.