Dealing with Lockdown and Stress
A multimedia story about how sewing during lockdown helped Margrethe deal with stress and loneliness
When the lockdown began, I would come to the office everyday, but it was dead quiet. Then I would go home and sit in the terrace, there were nightingales singing, and it was beautiful, but the city was dead quiet, too. No cars, no voices, no people going from A to B, there was nothing, and I felt incredibly lonely - like I was the only one on this planet. That really scared me. So I sewed, a lot.
My grandmother taught me how to knit and sew. As a child, I spent many of my summer holidays with her and I was allowed to use her sewing and knitting machines as much as I liked. Back in the day, there was not much to do during the holidays, and since my grandparents lived in this smaller city on Zealand, doing this helped fill up my days. With my grandma we would go to stores in Copenhagen and pick different fabrics and colours and she would help me sew something special for me, and that would make me feel like a million. Though, the true beauty of it all is that today, sewing remains this way for me to stay grounded: the fact that I create something with my hands is a swift way to battle anxiety and stress as they come.
This has been necessary for me lately, especially that during the early days of this crisis, I wasn’t allowed to travel back to Denmark, which meant I didn’t see my husband, two of our three daughters and our dog Karlo, for months. My husband and I had never been away from each other for so long. I missed my family terribly.
So, whenever I think of my grandmother, I think of how generous she was. It was deeply generous of her to take care of me and to teach me this skill: how to battle stress when it reaches me. She’ll always mean a lot to me.
Margrethe is the Executive Vice President of the European Commission for ‘A Europe Fit for the Digital Age’
Photo and story by Soundous Boualam
