How anxiety showed up while sewing my capsule

How I recognise anxiety

I define anxiety as a bad feeling, a worry or fear, that’s not proportional or sometimes even connected to the situation I’m in. To be honest that’s pretty close to the official definition too, but for me the proportional/connectedness is how I know when I’m anxious instead of just usefully worried. After all, feeling fear or worry is a natural reaction to danger. Anxiety is when you’re not in any danger and you’re still feeling crap.

One of the most destructive manifestations of anxiety, for me, is in thoughts that aren’t serving me. Jumping to less favourable conclusions (“it won’t work”), making assumptions (“I must have made a mistake”), negative self talk (“that mistake was so stupid”) and sometimes just convincing myself to play it safe, not try new things or being overly pessimistic (“don’t try colour blocking, just make it in black because otherwise it will be a waste”).

Sewing is an anxiety buster for me. It slows me down, gets me to focus, puts me in ‘flow’. But I’ve found it has also given me a controlled environment to witness how anxiety shows up in my life.

So, I wanted to share five ways anxiety showed up as I was making my capsule wardrobe. Not an exhaustive list by any means, but perhaps something here you might recognise in yourself too.

1. Plan-crastination

I procrastinate like crazy. I always have. For the longest time I thought it was because I was lazy and that to-do listing myself into oblivion was the answer. Until I realised that most of the things I put off were actually attached to some kind of fear — anything from a fear of failure, to a fear of being honest with myself about what I want.

For at least 11 months I knew I wanted to sew a capsule collection for Summer 22. I saved tons of ideas, opened 4,000 fabric tabs and then…carried on planning. When it comes to sewing, planning is my procrastination. Under the guise of “research” I put off starting to sew because I didn’t trust myself to make decisions about which patterns go with which fabrics or trust myself to make the piece as well as I wanted to. Money is another big anxiety trigger and so when I was adding in the cost of the fabric, I was completely stuck. In the end I didn’t start sewing until 15 days before my trip. Not trusting myself to make good decisions is one of the most vicious circle ways anxiety shows up in my life. I put things off until there’s no time and then I feel terrible for leaving myself no time.

I’d add that at work, where I’m asked to make decisions all day, I don’t hesitate. I trust myself in a work environment and so that pattern of behaviour is much less prevalent. This is why observing yourself in different environments and witnessing the different feelings, thoughts and patterns is so important.

My one fix for this is that I compile PDF patterns. There’s no way I can do that wrong and it tricks me into starting. And then I tell myself I’ll just cut out what I know I can cut out and why not, I can just sew a few bits, just to start…

2. Perfectionism paralysis

I heard somewhere that Steve Jobs had empty rooms in his house. A self-proclaimed perfectionist and a trait that had helped him build an incredibly successful company meant he sometimes couldn’t choose or find the perfect pieces of furniture and so would end up with nothing. We imagine perfectionism makes people create perfect things. It’s the cop-out weakness in an job interview, that we think will make us look good. Perfectionism actually makes people overcommit, hold themselves to impossible standards and then get so paralysed with anxiety that they can’t do anything. Nothing but perfect will do. This is the kind of thinking that shows up in every part of my sewing. If the fabric isn’t exactly what I wanted, I shouldn’t bother trying. If I make a mistake, I should give up. If the fit isn’t RTW-level, I’ll never wear it.

I loved a recent post by Handmade Millenial when she talked about her wedding dress and that despite the fact that she felt it wasn’t perfect, she was still able to enjoy wearing it. This is my goal, to allow myself space to learn and develop and still enjoy where I’m at.

My extreme deadline helped me avoid getting too hung up on mistakes or going for perfection, because perfection was more about a total number than an individually perfect piece, so…

3. Unrealistic or obsessive goals

Who told me that 22 pieces was the perfect number? Or more importantly that I couldn’t use previously sewn pieces to get to that perfect number. I have no idea what possessed me to set this insane goal for myself. Not only that, but at a moment where I needed self-care and calm, I chose to throw myself into a manic place where anything that wasn’t sewing, sleeping or working was not allowed.

This is why anxiety is an insidious little beast, because anxiety begets anxiety. I have the ability to create stress out of things that should be fun. I’ve finally accepted that going away makes me anxious. Finding a cat sitter, leaving my beloved cats and home in the hands of someone else, leaving behind all of my safety nets and familiar things, not working or being productive, handing tasks to other people, all cause me anxiety. But instead of being caring with myself, I doubled down and created a perfect anxiety storm with me in its centre.

This unrealistic 22-piece goal was that. I gave myself a way to look and feel super productive (which for me is always the ultimate goal), created a narrative that would make “well done you” sense to anyone I explained it to and also allowed me to feed my anxiety until I was in a sleep-deprived, racing thoughts, aching all over state. The only break I allowed myself was to see my mum for her birthday and even after all the work I’ve done to notice and work on my anxiety, she had to point out that perhaps I had accidentally got myself into quite an obsessive place. She forced me (nicely) to look at my behaviour in a different light. This is also why it’s so good to be honest about anxiety, because often it’ll be trusted friends and family who can help us notice when we’re in that state so we can shift out of it.

4. Negative loops and thoughts

If you don’t have outfits for this holiday you will have wasted an opportunity to take great pictures. You don’t have any nice RTW clothes and if you go and buy stuff now that would defeat the point. If you were [insert Instagrammer] this dress would be so much more interesting/better sewn/better fitting. The negative thoughts are so easy to get stuck in, and as much as I love Instagram, it’s a fertile ground for comparison and negative “evidence”. I won’t go into this too much as I’m sure it’s something we’re all familiar with, but my gosh, it’s a terrible part of my sewing journey that I’m really trying to work on!

5. “Showing off” on Instagram

Finally, shadow! Shadow is a Jungian concept focused on the bits of ourselves that we have tried to hide or repress in order to fit in, be loved or succeed. A good way to test your shadow is to imagine someone saying mean things to you, some things would slide off, some would be triggering AF. Call me lazy, I’d be like “sure”. Call me a show off, I’d panic. So for me, taking photos in public places, putting them on Instagram, trying to promote them in any way…nightmare. Every time I take about 40 photos and delete 38 of them. I have hundreds of photos where I’ve forgotten to unclench my fists. I say “that’s enough” after two minutes of photo taking, because I feel bad to ask people to take photos of me. And then I worry about the number of likes, because even if we don’t want to admit it, we all want people to pat us on the back and tell us we’ve done good. I had a good chat with a few people on Instagram about our ‘shadows’ and how they show up – I noticed that one Instagrammer always added a funny commentary apologising for self promotion any time she felt she was speaking too highly of herself. (Despite the fact that she’s incredible and should absolutely be promoting the hell out of her work). I love understanding my shadow better, because it helps me see the ways in which I’m going to play small. I’ve done some incredible online courses designed to help recognise my shadow, but sewing has been a useful place to see it play out. But shadow is a whole subject on its own and a deeper chat for another day.

In conclusion

So there you go. A few ways I find anxiety creeping in to my sewing practice, particularly in the weeks before I went on holiday. I’m not a professional here, but I have spent many hours researching, listening to podcasts, reading articles and in therapy to better understand myself better. And the thing I hate about anxiety is how easy it is to camouflage as positive, safe, responsible behaviour, so I’m hoping that by sharing, I might help someone else start the same journey I’ve been on, reframing my experiences and being kinder to myself.

With that in mind, did this resonate with you, are there ways anxiety shows up in your sewing or life that you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments.