Degrees

I didn't need my Sociology degree to understand the idea that we can all be thought of as yarn dolls.  We're all pretty much the same shape, but made from different types of yarn.  We vary in thickness, color, durability, sensitivity, touch, ease of working with, tension, yadayadayougetthemetaphor.

What maybe I did need the extra education for was thinking about the ties.  We are, all of us, bundled together into our own particular shape by ties.  The ties can be strangleholds, or they can barely keep us together.  They can slip out of place at times, changing how we look/feel.  They can be made of different stuff than the yarn that they're binding, so that we never feel quite right.  And then, occasionally, the ties can break altogether, and we come completely undone.

Now, depending upon which ties break, we may be able to fix ourselves.  Pull an extra length of yarn from someplace inconspicuous, and just re-tie.  Sometimes, we have to ask for a little help pulling things back together.  And, again, occasionally, our ties come undone so many times that they're too weak to use anymore.  And we've gone to the "extra strand" well too many times.  So we have to live (if you want to call it that) for a while as a tangled mass of yarn, one that some people can still recognize as having once been a unique and interesting doll, and think might again be repaired into one. 

 Some would look and see only a mess --- yarn with no purpose or potential.  Still others might see the snarl of yarn, for the second or third time, and wonder why that doll can't seem to stay together.  What that hopeless muddle of yarn is wondering is, why can't I seem, no matter how hard I try, to stay a good, sturdy yarn doll?  Why do I keep coming apart?  How many more times can this happen to me before there's no strong yarn left to work with, or no one left to help tie me back together?