Not that she didn’t know what it meant, but it wasn’t something she would ever think about doing. Feeling unloved as a child left her self-centered, angry and needy. As far as Lee Gant was concerned, the world owed her. But it was hard to get to know the world, as small as hers was. Sheltered and sequestered in a small coastal community in rural New England, she knew little about the daily lives of regular people with regular families, but enough to know that hers wasn’t like theirs. “Bad things happened in my house,” she said, “and I never understood why, because I was afraid to ask.”
Throughout her teen and young adult years, Lee used drugs and alcohol to
transport herself, begging attention from anyone and everyone. Chemicals seemed
to work in the short haul, but eventually her use led to more destructive
behaviors: setting fires, shoplifting, drunk driving, punching fists through
plate glass windows. Cutting helped drain her pent up self-loathing and
relieved her. Sutures and butterfly bandages briefly put her back together, but
after so many years and so many scars, self-mutilation wasn’t working. Ingesting
150 pills, a four-day coma and her subsequent near-death put an end to all of
that. After three weeks in an institution for attempted suicide, she was ready
to try something different.
One
day, out of the blue, Lee was invited into a knit shop filled with happy loving
people and found a passion and joy she never knew. “I made things with my hands
and felt good about myself. I entered an afghan in the county fair and won a
blue ribbon. I joined AA and stopped drinking. I found a community of creative
people who accepted me and my knitting and that, along with sober living,
brought the attention I craved. But still…something was missing,” she
said. She noticed she felt best when she shared her knowledge of knitting
and making other people happy brought a new kind of satisfaction.
On a whim,
Lee volunteered to teach knitting classes for kids for the local Santa Rosa
chapter of Catholic Charities. www.CatholicCharities.org.
She wanted to find out it knitting would make a difference for them like
it did for her. She wanted to give them something they could turn to when life
got too scary, or complicated, or boring… something they could turn to for
comfort or fun. She gave them sticks and string and direction. She gave them an
opportunity to feel accomplished and proud. She gave them a piece of herself
and found what she’d been missing.
Lee began
to care about other people. “I taught families at a homeless shelter to
knit. I taught a group of foster teens. I crocheted for battered women and
premature babies. I knit warm hats for cold-headed cancer patients I would
never get to know.
“All of
this giving changes me. I feel good inside. No longer hollow and self-centered,
I feel something akin to love. For others. For myself. For who I am. For what I
do.” Lee is not just any knitter; she is tremendously gifted and tremendously
generous. She is the author of several books, including Love in Every Stitch
and is a sought after pattern designer. Find her on Facebook with “Knitting and
Healing With Lee Gant” or you can find her at a shelter with a lot of bright,
beautiful skeins of yarn and a bunch of happy kids, doing what she does best.
I asked Lee
to sum up how it was that she came to be a “good in the world.”
“I blame it
on volunteering,” she said.
