I have not done any blogging for a while and you know why? Because I have been busy knitting socks!

This came about as a result of the forthcoming Drupalcon international conference which is due to take place in September in Hungary. My hubby is a Drupal specialist and, as he found huge value in attending the last European Drupalcon in Barcelona, he has worked hard to get himself to Hungary.  The Drupal community reminds me in many ways of my coaching community: people are enormously creative, very generous and wonderfully humourous. The proof of the fun bit is that there will be a knitting workshop at the Szeged (Hungary) conference! To my knowledge, never before has there been a knitting workshop at an international IT conference. Part of the point of learning how to knit is for delegates to produce a pair of Drupal socks!! I refer to them as The Official Drupal Socks.

My hubby told me about this and, like him, it made me chuckle. I then had a bright idea: why don't I have a go at knitting a pair of Drupal socks that hubby could wear at the conference? Armed with this bit of inspiration, a new set of five 3mm double-pointed needles, and some balls of blue and white yarn, off I went to start knitting.

When people tell you that whatever successful people do is 20% inspiration and 80% perspiration, they do not tell my sock story. For me, it turned out to be 1% childish inspiration and 99% frustrated perspiration! Knitting the socks served as a great metaphor for my recovery. There are so many things I could do without a second thought that now take me ages to re-learn... There are so many ways my patience with myself is being expanded (forget 'tested') way beyond its old skin....  There is so much un-doing and having another go for every doing I manage....

Having said that, I did finish the socks, as you can see in the picture below. These are The Unofficial Drupal Socks. I am very proud of them :0)

Better still, the socks actually fit on my hubby's feet and he is very proud of his Unofficial Drupal Socks too. He has even agreed to pose for me so that he could model his socks for you all to see :0)

In many ways, I feel I have won a small victory. In spite of my many false starts, I did reach the finishing line and it is good for the soul to have something concrete (I am even tempted to say something 'earthy', in all senses of the word) to grapple with.

In another way, I can also take humble pride in the fact that I succeeded in completing something that I wanted to achieve, for no other reasons than to feel again the pleasure of achievement. And so, I feel I didn't just knit a pair of socks - I showed all the times of dark despair I have known in the past that I could win. 

I socked it to them :0)