In winter 2026, I capriciously signed up for a beginner woodworking class one afternoon. I'd spent the whole morning before that feeling the nagging urge to be unmoored in what felt like a brutally dark timeline. I was a year into PTSD treatment and it felt like things still hadn't reached their lowest point. I was bracing for my own memory.
PTSD therapy relies on bilateral stimulation, the simple rhythm of left to right. We do it constantly: walking, running, dreaming. But with PTSD, there's just so much to metabolize. The way an anemic person chews ice without knowing why, my nervous system kept searching for places I could occupy that expected coordinated movement. I didn't know I was looking for nervous system regulation. I told Joel I just "wanted to do something with my hands that I've never done before near other people."
One of the recent things that had come up in therapy was that as an adult, I still don't feel like I'm allowed to be an adult because of the extremely controlling environment that I grew up in. I didn't knnow how to use basic hand tools and I avoided learning because I thought I wasn't allowed to, yet--now 41 years old--I had no one to point to but myself about that. That was just one of many costs of PTSD: carrying outdated permissions long after the authority that imposed them has disappeared.
The class was offered for seven weeks on Friday mornings. The night before the first class, I reflected to Joel that I was nervous about how the class might be formatted. I was excited to be around humans, but I was nervous about the idea of being watched while learning how to do something, being evaluated, being seen. Not because I thought anyone there was going to be mean, but because just the simple act of being observed while learning has danger attached to it from my past... and I don't even know why yet, only that I can't keep upholding it when reality keeps showing me that I'm older now.
The class was calm, laid back, a handful of 30-50-year-olds just picking up a new hobby and wanting to be around other people as they enjoyed it. The teacher, who started the class off with a "Do as I say, not as I do" lecture on tool safety walked us through the individual tool stations, where one-by-one, we each took turns milling a plank of cherry wood. Each person had their own personality interacting with the tools. One woman was very eager to go first, one was quick to ask really smart questions about the reasoning behind certain processes, another valued the hands-on experience enough to want to go multiple times. I found myself standing back in the group, often going last.
As I pushed the mostly flat baord through the jointer, it felt like time slowed down. It was taking forever for me to push the board through, like I was using all of my force and it wasn't budging. The board finally passed through, but there was now a burn mark on the wood from where it had clearly spent too long in one spot. The teacher hand-waved it to the group, noting that it would sand out later. But even if the wood were okay, I still didn't understand why I had frozen up so much at the jointer. The wood was the evidence.
The class ended with a brief discussion of wood choice for the cutting board and box we'd each be making. An exotic wood, purpleheart, was mentioned, and it called to me by name alone.
A few days later, I ventured over to the lumber store. One of my classmates showed at the same time I did and we talked through some of the options. I noticed she was so much more engaged with the process of shopping for wood than I was. I wanted to be able to feel that excited about options, the way she was. I couldn't bring myself to step away from the exotic wood at the front of the store though.
I'd always been that way--magnetically drawn to beautifully loud drama, and the two pieces of wood I picked, purpleheart and marble wood, were perfect examples of that. The marble wood was fibrous and splintered my hands just holding it like a thorny rose that punishes you if you're not tender. The purpleheart was different; dense but sensitive to change, touch, and light, changing color in response to even the slightest variation in how it's handled.
When I brought it into the classroom, my classmates had a sort of reverence for it that I lacked, and I wondered why I couldn't appreciate it in the same way. I'd done some research on the wood and learned that if you leave it outside, it'll oxidize in sunlight and become more purple, but indoors, after planing and sanding it, it would look brown. It screamed feral to me, allergic to care and hands-on attention. I saw reflections of myself in that understanding.
We just hit the ground running with the cutting boards the second class, ripping the wood, chopping it down, milling it, and me questioning every step of the way if I truly believed I'd finish even the board, based on how uncertain I felt of each thing I did. A friendly banter carried around the room between the loud buzzes of various saws and shop vacs. As I stood at the planer, I noticed my purpleheart was stuck. I could smell burning. I tried to reverse the teeth, but it didn't work. One lady stared with confused concern nearby. We finally managed to push the board through but it now had a large black mark on it. The teacher laughed and said it would sand out. I gave a thumbs up, because I didn't really care if it would or not--I wasn't chasing perfection.
One of my classmates was glueing her board up across the table from me and the board was absolutely gorgeous already. She has a real eye for discerning grain details and in the class she'd talk through her process aloud, but it was clear she has an unspoken art for curating a piece into beauty and had arranged her pieces out, working hard to make sure the board surface was evenly submerged in glue. Nervous I'd make a mess, I used less glue, not knowing that my two choices of wood could not be more opposite in how they responded to wood.
