Set the yarn aside again tonight

I keep setting the yarn aside before I even get the needles out, which is a small thing on its own but it’s starting to feel like a pattern, because every time I sit down in the evening meaning to just knit for a bit and let my hands do something quiet, my mind goes straight back to the move, or the job thing, or both at once, and the yarn just sits there on the arm of the chair until I give up and go to bed. We’re packing boxes this week, nothing dramatic, just the slow kind of sorting where you open a drawer you haven’t touched in years and have to decide, right then, whether something is worth the space it’ll take up in the next place, and I’ve noticed I’ve moved the same bag of craft supplies from one pile to another more than once now without actually putting anything in a box, like if I don’t decide it isn’t a decision yet. I’m also supposed to be applying for something different, a different kind of work than what I’ve done most of my life, and I’ve sent out 6 applications so far and heard back from exactly none of them, which people keep telling me isn’t unusual, but knowing that doesn’t make the waiting feel any different, it just sits there alongside the boxes and the yarn, and some nights all of it crowds in at the same time, the move and the job and whether I’m too old to be starting something new, and I end up just sitting in the chair not knitting and not packing and not really doing anything with the quiet, which kind of defeats the whole point of trying to carve out that time in the first place. The strange part is I don’t even know if I’m applying the right way, I’ve never done this kind of search before, I spent most of my working life doing one kind of thing in one place, and now I’m supposed to write about myself like I know exactly what I’m good at, which some days I do and some days I genuinely don’t. I think what gets me most is that I wanted the evening knitting to be the one thing that wasn’t a task, the one thing I didn’t have to finish or get right or measure myself against, and instead it’s turned into one more thing I’m failing to get to, one more unfinished pile sitting next to the boxes. I don’t have a tidy way to close this out, I just know the yarn is still on the arm of the chair right now, untouched, same as it was last night.