I knitted the Jumper of Sadness in the winter of 1995, running in to 1996, when I fell ill with severe clinical depression. For six months I spent a lot of time going to see psychiatrists and counsellors and crying. And in my spare time, I knitted this enormous jumper. The repetitive movement and need to count carefully to ensure I stayed on the pattern offered some mild relief from the hell I was in. Something to think about besides suicide. As long as I had a jumper to knit, I suppose, I had a reason to live.
When I finished the jumper, sometime that spring, it was much too big for me and even much too big for my dad, who is well over six feet tall. I wore it anyway, like a giant wool hug, as the combination of anti-depressants and counseling and simply learning to cope began to kick in and I felt not recovered, but quite a lot better.
I’ve never been so ill, nor knitted another jumper, since.
When I was at my parents’ place over Thanksgiving, I found the Jumper of Sadness. It has a small moth hole in the back, but it is still big and warm and charmingly executed by my depressed teenage hands. The perfect thing to wear of an evening in my chilly flat.
It’s tempting to think that if my fourteen-year-old self could see me now, she’d say, wow, things really will get better, so I guess I’ll try to hang on.
But in fact I suspect what she actually would say is: why the hell are you wearing a fifteen-year-old sweater?
