Grey Fuzzy Sweater

It's okay to take breaks — yes, even big ones

Editors Note: This archival post is not part of the Loose Standards content series.

When I was a much younger man, I lived for a while with a woman who carved her path through life very differently than anything I had ever experienced before. I don’t want to over-explain and try to boil her down to a bunch of inadequate clichés, but suffice it to say that to my 21-year-old mind, she was truly one of the most unique and seemingly paradigm-immune people I had ever met. I learned a ton from her and I’m a better person for knowing her, despite – or perhaps in part because of – the many mistakes I’ve made (and successes I’ve enjoyed) trying to understand and apply the lessons and new ways of thinking that she helped open up for me. Volumes could be written about that time in my life, about her and her tremendous impact on me. But today I’m going to focus on just one – the winter of the grey fuzzy sweater.

I met her in the summer, and slowly got to know her better and better as the year went on, eventually moving in with her and several other young creatives that I often collaborated with, but with whom really I mostly just got into a ton of mischief – a vital mode of creative learning in and of itself. She was a bit older than the rest of us, which seemed significant at the time even though the person she was then would seem a bit young to me now. But she was a true creative in every sense of the word – artist, musician, rebel, scholar, teacher, instigator, muse, and so much more. She exuded a kind of raw, wild and magical vitality that I had never encountered before, and she managed to model it all amidst an alluringly skillful yet precarious balance of chaos and control. But as the year wore on from summer to autumn and eventually winter, something in her started to turn. The reasons certainly weren’t all seasonal, but the changing of the seasons nonetheless contributed to the metaphor she developed to express what became known as her “gray fuzzy sweater period.”

She’d been investing a lot in other people, as well as in her own hope that while having a positive impact on them, she could also reciprocally experience a return of joy and inspiration for herself as well. And to some extent she did, for a while. But not everything went according to plan. I won’t tell her story in detail, but the truth is she experienced loss. She experienced cruelty and indifference. She experienced disappointment and confusion. And she started to lose confidence in her own light. She knew she was a magical, powerful, brilliant individual, but as the weather turned ever colder, she was feeling her energy sapped, her mood diminishing. She began to take stock, grew a bit reclusive, and retreated into what we might now refer to as a regime of self-care (a foreign concept to me back then). She stopped performing, stopped hosting or attending events. She stopped participating in our group reverie, preferring her own company to anyone else’s. She sought calm and quiet over the rowdy, bawdy engagements she once delighted in stoking and conceiving. She talked a lot about her growing disdain for the banality of cultural signifiers in conversational language. She started cooking more, always with whatever fresh ingredients she could get her hands on without having to go out of her way to source very much, and never from a recipe, instead letting her spirit and intuition guide flavor combinations, seasoning, etc. As a freelancer, she worked an awful lot less. And her style changed. Leather and metal, jewels and flowing fabrics, form-framing silhouettes and high-heeled boots that laced up over the knee lay flopped in the closet, recovering from a long season of stretching and yawing, holding, shaping and sweating. Her style became a kind of organic expression of anti-style, favoring comfort, warmth, and frankly swaddling above all else. Well-worn denim, long-sleeves and enveloping garments, cottons, wools, knitted scarves and anything homey and comfortable were her new trademark staples.

But no article of clothing made a more regular appearance that winter than this one, big, ancient gray fuzzy sweater. It became not only a kind of second-skin, but also a symbolic touchstone for everything she was feeling and going through, and all her hopes for coming out on the other side. Later, she would regularly refer to that winter, to that season of her life as her gray fuzzy sweater period. And though it was a low time for her, a time of struggle and pause and licking wounds new and old alike, it comforts me that it wasn’t some element of the darkness in and around her that she chose to define it, but instead named it for the item that represented every tool and resource she employed to get through it and brought her peace.

I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately as I’ve been going through a bit of a gray fuzzy sweater period of my own, and at the time of writing this, finally feeling some sense that I’m coming out on the other side. I made some big changes in my life toward the end of last year – both personally and professionally – and have either walked away or taken long breaks from relationships and environments that had for whatever reason become toxic or unsustainable for me. And I’ve struggled. Moments of hope and joy and a sense of adventure and possibility have been deeply tempered by tremendous self-doubt, second-guessing and at times, even despair. I lost a lot of momentum. Going into autumn and through the winter, I worked a lot less, eventually reaching the end of a long, safe runway I had carefully laid out for myself, and things got very lean. While I haven’t once regretted the key decisions that were the catalyst for a lot of these changes, I have to own the fact that I could have handled some of what came after more diligently, and express tremendous gratitude for the colleagues and cherished friends and family without whose support the deep well of navigating this major transition would have been much, much deeper. I recognize the privilege of having such a support network; I’m humbled and grateful. And as the hard work of building my way through this new phase of my life is beginning to tangibly pay off, I’m aware of the symmetry of this new season of my life blooming just as the long dark of winter fades into the rebirth of spring. While time and experience have taught me that the seasons of life come in peaks and valleys, in abundance and in want, I’m determined to work to ensure that seasons such as the one I’ve just survived come as few and far between as possible. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have been witness and hopefully friend and comfort to my old roommate during her long period of hibernation and healing, and grateful to have learned from her suffering and rebirth a framework to persevere and hold on to hope through my own gray fuzzy sweater period when it came for me.

Those who know me know I’ve been a huge fan of the art of drag performance even since before RuPaul broke into the mainstream and revolutionized pop culture as we know it. One of my favorite TV moments from one of my favorite drag queens came during the season 4 reunion episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, when Latrice Royale said, “It’s ok to make mistakes. It’s ok to fall down. Get up, look sickening, and make them eat it.” This is so perfect, especially coming from an artist who has legitimately been through it all and now become an absolute legend. And although I’ve never been through many of the particular struggles Royale has overcome, I can still relate to some parallels between her insight and my own experience.

This life will get you down. It’s ok to find opportunities in pain and in your own defeats. It’s ok to feel defeated. It’s ok to take breaks. It’s ok to take time off. Take time to reflect on where you are, how you got there, and where you want to go next. Own your part in getting you there, for better or for worse, but don’t beat yourself up with blame – just learn the lessons you need to learn and move on. Forgive yourself. And forgive others, too, if you can. If you can’t, don’t. That’s cool, too. It’s ok to separate yourself from people – anyone – who you feel is keeping you from being your best. That is your call to make. Take time to enjoy yourself again if you can – take pleasure in reacquainting with the things you really love, the things that matter most to you, and in the people and things that bring you the most joy, or make you feel the most safe. Or just rest if that’s what you need. That’s ok. It’s ok to heal. It’s ok to retreat. It’s ok to say for a while, “I’m sorry, I just can’t right now.” Not everyone in your life will understand, and that’s ok, too. But lean into the ones that do if you’re fortunate enough to have them, and either way, you’ll know when you’re ready to come back. If you need help, please reach out and find it. And I promise, you’ll be more powerful and more prepared for whatever comes next than you ever were before.

So thank you to my old roommate, and to all the gray fuzzy sweaters in my life – you know who you are.