Tunnel vision

I’ll be the first to admit that being a knitwear designer rocks. It’s a fun, creative job, full of different tasks that allow you to keep your fingers in many different jam jars – which also makes boredom an impossible, almost forgotten feeling. You see your name in print (ego boost!), people talk about you and your designs on the internet, and you can even get free yarn. (I call it material testing, like a pastry chef, I need to check those cupcakes before I commit to them, yes… that’s what I call it)

You come up with an idea, a good one, and like in a movie, the spotlight shines on it. There’s nothing but bright, white light surrounding your idea and the light cheers you on until the garment is done and the pattern is released. Pure unadulterated joy.

Then again, there’s other things that make this job I chose the worst choice for me. There’s artist’s block. There’s having to do what you have to do when you don’t want to do it. Some call it procrastination, but in me, it’s mostly laziness.

I’m a sensitive person. This goes hand in hand with self-doubt and inability to make a decision when required to do so because of fear of choosing the wrong path. Sensitivity makes it also very hard to look at things objectively, especially when it comes to rejection.

As far as I have experienced, there’s 3 kinds of rejections -

- The ones that you never hear from again (like the boyfriend that never called again… I pretend they never got the call or fell down a manhole on the street, easier for my soul).

- The ones where you get all your materials back, crumpled in an envelope, saying “thanks but no thanks” (ouch)

- And the email type – like the above but with even less of a reason for the rejection

There’s the time when rejection is the ONLY thing coming your way. Black clouds come easy: Have I chosen the wrong career? Did I do anything wrong? Is my knitting not up to scratch? Do they think I’m ages away from being “good enough” for them?

Sometimes, when the rejected idea makes its way back to me and I can look at it in the cold light of day and say “yes… what on Earth were you thinking”. Other times, I can’t find the reasons. When this is the case, I tend to keep these ideas in a folder and re-visit them. Sometimes I reject them altogether and pretend it all happened in a lobotomy kind of day, and other times I make a couple of changes, improve the sketch and description and funnily enough, another publisher thinks that piece will be great for them.

A part of me never quite left school, and thinks that every single rejection will mount up to my final grade. After all, if I were in art school and my ideas were deemed “not artistically related to the topic” I’d fail, right? Competition, much like in art, is stiff. There’s many designers, some professionals whose food depends on their earnings (read – myself) and others who simply play at it on the side of a full-time job. This makes the need to get the gig much more urgent – I understand there’s guys doing this for fun but my roof depends on my making money, so it’s impossible not to take it personally when your idea is rejected.

It’s taken a while for me to learn that the less time I pick on myself about a rejection, the sooner I’ll be back in full swing trying out new ideas, or transforming those rejections into a successful self-published pattern as I’ve done before.

I’ve also found that I need to tone down some things to get acceptances. Certain publications seem to think less-is-more and I kept, stubborn, sending my out-of-this-world ideas to them – hence the rejection. I’ve point-blank refused to send submissions to certain places too, given that I’ve tried everything under the sun to get in and all of them have been dismissed – it’s a 99%-sure fact we simply don’t fit, so dust off my shoulders, I move along.

Why am I rambling about all this?

I’ve a submission in my hands. I’m thinking about it. Overly thinking about it. It’s swatched. It’s sketched. It’s (more or less) laid out to be sent off.

And I’m AFRAID.

I looked at it this morning and the thought popped into my head…

“they are going to hate it”

I can’t get that thought out of my head. I’ve done laundry. I’ve been out and froze my head to death in the winter chill, I’ve had a coffee, I’ve had a walk, I’ve marveled at the frost on top of the gardens this morning. And I still think I’m not going to send it through, because at the moment, I don’t think I can face it.

Remember the spotlight I spoke of before? This idea is the opposite. Like a tunnel, I’m in. Instead of a bright white light I can only see darkness surrounding my idea, and I somehow cannot make it shine.

It may be a great idea in my head – is it the physical translation that’s not working?

Bad yarn? Bad sketch? Bad stitching?

Or is it just me? I may have woken up 2 seconds too late today, I may be out of touch today and the darkness is just, well, a lack of a feeling. I’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll be gone. But tomorrow it’ll be too late, out of deadline for submissions.

Do I send it in, feeling it’s not my best? Do I put it in the rejected pile, waiting to re-discover it? I’ve until bedtime to make up my mind, but this exercise made me think of the most important question of all – will this questioning of my abilities ever go away?