margotvankapelle | Working working working and no time to myself

I've been working, as you can probably guess from my recent posts. Sadly, this does not live me in a position to be able to do stuff for myself as far as Adria or really any reenactment goes. Part of it is time, part is the heat in the doggoned house, and a lot of it is having Random Gamer Guy in my house. How can I be completely myself when there is someone in my home with whom I do not feel comfortable?

Let me tell you what sewing means in my home. Generally, I get a wild hair at random, cut out whatever my new project will be, then spend about 12 hours at the sewing machine with my mp3 player plugged into my ears and singing at the top of my lungs. There may or may not be a certain amount of undress, depending on what I'm working on and how many times I feel the need to measure progress or check fitting issues. I might take crappy phone pictures to upload to Photobucket, might twirl around and act like a silly little kid playing dress up, but mostly it is just me, headphones in, sitting at the sewing machine, singing my lungs out and cranking out whatever my little heart tells me I need to make.

The catch is that I am extremely self-conscious about it. I generally don't even start a project when Boe is in the house -- it's okay if he's home once I'm actually working on whatever the project is, but all the anxieties and insecurities come out to play at the very beginning and it's better if I wrestle with those particular demons on my own. Once I'm started, I can generally tune the rest of the world out, and it should tell you something that as a smoker, I can forget about nicotine cravings for those 12 hours (unless something is going Horribly, Horribly Wrong). Naturally, I also forget to eat anything either, but Boe usually cuts me off at about 12 hours at the machine in order to make sure I eat something.

But with a relative stranger in my home, in my safe place to be completely and utterly myself? Well, I'll let you draw your own conclusions.