When I consider the large number of things in this world that I adamantly avoid (pre-calculus, prolonged eye contact, hair braiding, logarithms, shaving, calligraphy, the ACT, etc.), knitting is the final, impassable frontier. I can’t knit. I won’t knit. I will never knit.

This has been a difficult truth to come to ever since I was young, annoying, and extremely impressionable. I knit a hat once to appease curiosity for my mother, though it’s the only thing I’ll ever knit (I call it my clown barf hat for a reason). I know I can knit, and that I should want to knit. I’ve been raised around sheep and textile artists (a culture of surrogate grandmothers wearing hand-knit socks with sandals, discussing sustainable organic cotton, mushrooms, and menopause), so I have no real excuse for not knitting—I have the skills, the tutors, and the frighteningly large quantities of yarn. I just won’t do it, and I’m accepting that now because I know from experience that knitting makes my brain explode.

But it’s okay, I don’t have to do it. I think by this point my mother and her friends have accepted the loss. They’ve given me mohair locks to make rainbow leg warmers and listened to the long-winded explanations behind my felted cell diagrams that look like pea pods and ham. I try to make crafts that I want to make, do the art I want to do, and spend my free time how I want to spend it. What would be the point of it otherwise?