MACRAMÉ

A New Life and Macramé

By Jocelyn Tatum Photos courtesy Kristen Richard

Just as a virus was changing the world in January 2020, macramé artist Kristen Richard was undergoing her own transformation. She was in Mount Nebo, Arkansas, camping with two friends, hiking through waterfalls, cooking over a fire and breathing the freshest air she had ever experienced when she stopped her meds for the first time since she was 15. She felt so alive, so uninhibited. “There was this sense of freedom that I’ve never felt before,” she said.

That was two years ago. She was 24 and had already tried to come out when she was 12 but says she was quickly shut down. When she was 15, she was loaded up on the highest doses of ADHD meds to control the rainbow of bold thoughts and feelings she experienced daily. When she was diagnosed, the doctors said she had the more impulsive side of the diagnosis than the attention deficit part. She would feel happy and controlled just moments after swallowing the tiny pill — the way she thought she was supposed to and the way society thought she was to be. But she noticed that it also made her feel completely different as if it was dimming her inner light. “I was just a bystander in my own life,” she says. “I was literally just waking up to get through the day.”

Experiencing such freedom in the Arkansas mountains inspired her to start again, tying her life back together one knot at a time. She developed feelings for one of the girls on that trip, and they are now in a relationship. That year, she came out by February, filed for divorce from her husband by March, finalized the divorce by May and quit her job as a receptionist by June.

“The flood of emotions and basically all of the events that happened after getting off my medication, I definitely believe stemmed from finally being off of my medicine. I actually felt like I could feel all of my emotions a lot stronger once I got off of my medicine,” Kristen says.

By July, macramé would become a grain of hope that would grow into the pearl her life is now. In the midst of all this change, she found a new constant.

Kristen had seen a piece of macramé over a video conference when working virtually as a front desk receptionist. She was inexplicably drawn to it and began to teach herself through books and YouTube. She dove all the way in. “Here I am the good little wife who all of a sudden gets off her meds, ... quits her job and says, ‘Hey, I’m going to put my whole financial security into a career doing a craft I just learned on YouTube.’ I mean, it sounds nuts,” she says.

She doesn’t have words for what pulled her toward the craft except that it was beautiful to her. What keeps her going is her love for what she creates and how much the process calms her. When she no longer had a pill to calm and neatly organize her thoughts and feelings as if her mind was a Container Store catalog, macramé gave her a quiet space to teach her brain to focus. “I am a very emotional being. I feel a lot, I think a lot. There is, at all times, a conversation going on upstairs for me, and especially during that time when I’m processing the guilt of leaving my marriage, the confusions of my sexuality, the uncertainty of — for the first time in my life — being financially responsible for myself,” she says.

There was so much to unpack at times, so she would sit by herself in a quiet place and tie knots for hours — her form of therapy. “Every piece I would make, there was a behind-the-scenes battle that was taking place in my head as I figured out where I wanted this strand to hang or how I wanted to connect that section to the next,” Kristen says.

Each knot she tied became a new page in her story. She was ready to build a new life, an authentic life where she was true to who she was — unmedicated. “Being able to be behind-the-scenes, watching her inspiration process, watch it move her, change her and transform her into one of the most fascinating humans I’ve ever met,” her girlfriend Erica Williams says.

Top: This 200+ sq. ft residential macrame installation piece was commissioned by and installed in Fort Worth entrepeneurs Katherine and Jonathan Morris’ home.

I guess I see macramé as that doorway I stepped through when I decided to be this different person.”

- KRISTEN RICHARD

All of her new thoughts and feelings are shared along with her creations on Instagram, and she says macramé has given her the confidence to be vulnerable and honest about what she now feels. “I was sharing some of the most intimate details about myself, and I really allowed my work to not just tap into this vulnerable place, but then to essentially broadcast it. I had never done that, so I guess I see macramé as that doorway I stepped through when I decided to be this different person,” she says.

In a recent Instagram post, she shared that this new line of work is so much more than just the exchange of goods and services for her. “It is the belief that another human has in your abilities that sometimes you don’t even fully believe in, that steps you outside of your comfort zone,” she writes. From this place she begins to create and exist on a deeper level. She is now “on fire for her life,” she says emphatically in her East Texas drawl with a smile sweeter than sweet tea. “I deserve to live and to be happy,” she says. Through her work and her voice on social media, she wants everyone to know they deserve a life this beautiful too.

WHERE CAN YOU FIND HER WORK:

Instagram @kristenanne_ Website: kristenannefibers.com *She takes commissions.

Left: “This season has been a constant exploration of who this version of me is willing to become. If I’ve ever felt the literal sense of adulting, it has been this period of challenges that have forced me to dig, not just into who I am, but also why, allowing me to move forward to the unlived places waiting for me.”