The world is still a dark and scary place, and the part of me that wants to fix everything is really struggling right now, because I feel so utterly powerless to do anything meaningful.

Despite the darkness, though, there have been some small glimmers of light this week. Here are three of them.

1. I’ve been knitting more. Not every day, but more days that I’ve been knitting all summer. Knitting is one of those things that, particularly in the summer, I tend to forget how much I enjoy it and how relaxing it can be until I sit down to actually do it. I bought some really lovely yarn from The Verdant Gryphon at Stitches Midwest a couple of weekends ago, which helped to kick-start my knitting mojo just a little bit. It’s nice to be excited about creating things with my hands. (On a knitting-related note: knitters should go to Ravelry and check out the pattern my partner published this week!)
2. I’m getting more excited about music again. I’ve been seriously slacking off for the past couple of months, in part because I was dealing with DepressedBrain, and while DepressedBrain is greatly helped by music, sometimes the thought of taking the instrument out of the case (or even taking it off the stand) is too overwhelming. I decided to swap out the strings on my tenor guitar and play around with a new, lower tuning, and that’s gotten me to play more this past week. I even set up a SoundCloud page for myself. It doesn’t have anything on it yet, but I’m sifting through the songs I’ve written for class and hoping to start recording some of them and throwing them online sometime in the next week or so.
3. The third thing is going to be super vague for the moment (I’m hoping to post more next week), but in the past week I’ve nailed down some details and made some actual plans for moving forward on something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. There’s still a lot of waiting and there will need to be some challenging conversations before it happens, but it’s finally starting to feel real.