Stitch by Stitch

For years, I’ve wanted to learn to sew. I imagined the small and steady satisfaction of turning something “broken” into something beautiful or useful. But wanting was all I ever seemed to have time for. Between long hours and the emotional & mental weight that comes with life, family, and working in public service, my days belonged to everyone else. Sewing lived permanently on the “someday” list… a place where good intentions go when work has swallowed up your identity.

This year, though, something shifted. After more than a decade in public service, I stepped away - burned out, stretched thin, and unsure who I was without the constant rush of urgency. I took a sewing class almost on a whim, thinking it would be a fun new hobby. Instead, it became a revelation. When I finished my first project (a pillow case made from vintage Batman sheets!) and held it in my hands - crooked seams and all - I felt something I hadn’t felt in years: joy. Simple, unambiguous, unproductive joy. And that moment stitched itself into a larger realization about how I had been living my life.

Sewing, I’ve found, is a surprisingly honest metaphor for change.

A pattern looks like chaos at first… disconnected pieces in strange shapes that don’t yet resemble anything. Taking scissors to fabric feels counterintuitive: you literally cut something apart in order to create something whole. Pivoting in life often works the same way. Something has to give. You have to reshape. We have to be willing to unmake what isn’t working before we can build something new.

For years, I tried to hold my life together without altering the pattern at all. I told myself if I just worked harder, if I gave more of myself, the right work with the right title… things would feel aligned. But burnout is what happens when you keep stitching the same seam long after it’s frayed. Eventually, you realize you’re sewing yourself into something that no longer fits.

Stepping away from my old career wasn’t just a professional change; it was a personal unseaming. It meant acknowledging that the closeness I felt to my work came at the cost of closeness to myself. It meant loosening my grip on the idea that my identity was defined by my usefulness, my productivity, or the size of the problems I carried. It meant accepting that I deserved to create joy on purpose.. not by accident, not when there was leftover energy, but as a priority.

Sewing has taught me that joy rarely arrives fully formed. It begins with small steps: threading a machine, guiding the fabric, forgiving yourself when a seam goes crooked. Life is shaped the same way. We don’t wake up and magically become people who prioritize ourselves. We practice. We undo stitches.

We learn. We begin again.

There is tenderness in the slowness of sewing. An intimacy with detail that asks for presence rather than perfection. I’m learning to bring that same tenderness into the rest of my life. To ask: What brings me delight? What makes me smile without trying? Who are the people I want to give my energy to, not because they demand it but because they nourish me? What parts of my life need to be hemmed, loosened, or let out entirely?

The truth is, sewing isn’t about clothes or cushions or tote bags. It’s about creation. It’s about forming something intentionally, stitch by stitch, instead of living inside a life assembled out of a response to childhood voids, our default settings and accumulated obligations. When I sit at my sewing machine now, I feel myself practicing a new kind of alignment - one where work is part of my world but not the whole of it, where success feels like balance instead of exhaustion, and where I can recognize myself not by what I produce but by what I love.

In this season of my life, I’m learning that change doesn’t always require a dramatic reinvention. Sometimes it’s as simple as choosing to cut a new pattern. Sometimes it’s trusting that even if the pieces look strange at first, they’ll fit together in time. Sometimes it’s allowing yourself to believe that joy is not a luxury but a guide - a thread that, when you follow it, leads you back to yourself.

Sewing has given me a reminder I didn’t know I needed: life is something we make. And we get to choose, again and again, what we are stitching toward.

Sewing Class - ftw!