Messy Rows Are Still Rows
On chess, creativity, and building a life I actually love
Hi, Hello, Friends! 🤓
This year, one of the most healing things I’ve been learning is how to build a life I actually love.
Not all at once.
Not through some dramatic overhaul or shiny perfect transformation.
But in tiny, ordinary often messy ways.
For the last three months, I’ve been learning how to play chess.
Not competitively. Not with any real goal attached. Just learning the rules, strategy, how the pieces move, how to slow down long enough to think a few steps ahead, how to sit with not knowing what the “right” move is yet.
And to be clear: chess is stressful as hell.
It requires focus. It requires patience. It requires me to slow down when every part of me wants to rush, react, or mentally flip the board. I lose pieces because I’m impatient. I miss obvious things because I want to move too fast. And when I screw up, I have to sit there and deal with it instead of immediately fixing it.
Which is exactly why I like it.
Chess forces me to practice not losing my shit.
It’s uncomfortable in a very specific way. Not emotionally heavy, just demanding. It asks me to stay regulated while thinking ahead. To pause before acting. To accept that I’m going to make bad moves and that the game doesn’t end because of one mistake.
That practice translates.
For a long time, I thought healing was something you arrived at. Like there was a finish line. Or a moment where everything finally clicked into place and stayed perfectly “there”. What I’m learning instead is that healing is often quieter than that. it looks less like an emotional realization and more like meeting a need I ignored for years.
If I’m not creating, I burn out. My body shows it often before my mind catches up and I become aware of it.
I’ve learned over time that if I’m not creating or actively engaging my brain in a meaningful way, I burn out. My body figures this out long before my mind does. I get edgy, restless, foggy, and disconnected. Pushing harder has never fixed that.
I used to miss the early signs. The heaviness. The fog. The irritability that didn’t make sense on paper. I’d try to think my way out of it, push through it, tell myself I just needed to be more disciplined or more efficient or less sensitive. But my nervous system was already waving a flag.
Now I am attuned enough to hear my own needs. Not always immediately. But each day my voice is becoming my anchor more and more.
I’m learning to build a life that makes room for my creativity, instead of treating it like a luxury or a reward that I have to earn after everything else is done. I do not have to earn the right to use my creativity.
Writing.
Learning chess.
Learning to knit.
Creating with my hands.
These things aren’t hobbies I picked up to be impressive or productive. They’re regulation. They’re grounding. They’re how my nervous system settles safely back into my body. None of these are about productivity or self-improvement. They’re maintenance. They’re how I keep myself from shutting down.
There’s something about making things that don’t need to be optimized. Something about sitting with a notebook or a chessboard or a pile of yarn and letting myself be a beginner. Letting myself be slow. Letting myself be bad at it.
Alongside chess, I’ve been getting into what I call junk journaling. It’s messy. It’s layered. There are stickers, scraps, pressed flowers, random notes, half-formed thoughts. It’s not pretty in a curated way and it’s not trying to be.
I like that it doesn’t require coherence. I don’t have to make sense. I don’t have to finish a thought. I can just put things somewhere instead of holding them all in my head.
Recently, that turned into something bigger: the Sisterhood of the Traveling Journal.
There are five of us total, including me. Three of the women are people I have never met or spoken to before. We’re passing a shared journal around and each adding pages before sending it on.
No expectations. No performance. No pressure to be profound.
I’ll talk more about that later, because it deserves its own post.
Recently, I found a set of my Nanna’s knitting needles. Just tucked away, waiting. Nothing ceremonial about it. But it felt significant all the same. Like a small thread connecting me to a version of care that didn’t require words. I don’t know what she was making with them. I don’t know if she was any “good” at knitting either. What I know is that they were used. And now they’re being used again.
Supposedly, one or all of these skeins of yarn should become a shawl. Or a scarf. Or something vaguely rectangular that technically counts 😂
There are no guarantees. I might drop stitches. I might unravel entire rows. I might change my mind halfway through. But that’s kind of the point.
For so long, I measured my worth by outcomes. By usefulness. By whether something could be justified after the fact. Creating without an end goal feels like practice in trusting myself. In letting process matter more than proof.
There’s a phrase I wrote on the cover of my knitting journal: Messy rows are still rows.
It’s true in knitting. It’s true in writing. It’s true in healing
I need that reminder because I forget it under pressure.
I default to thinking things only count if they’re clean, finished, or useful.
But progress doesn’t vanish just because it’s messy.
Effort doesn’t stop counting because it didn’t turn out the way I planned.
A lot of what I’m building right now doesn’t need to be finished, shared, or explained.
It just needs to exist.
I just need to exist.
Chess. Yarn. Paper. Glue sticks. Half-formed thoughts.
They’re enjoyable. They’re a little ridiculous. They’re genuinely pretty.
And they also slow me down.
They give my hands somewhere to go.
They keep me from rushing past myself.
I am not my past.
I am the story.
I choose to keep writing.
💌 Thank you for meeting me here, friends!
A la Luna, 🌙
Lauren 🪻🍀
I have been working on a creative little project over at [freckledlore.com]
She is a work-in-progress just like I am. I hope to meet you there. 🤓