Several years ago, I found this nifty pattern for making little hearts. It’s just technical enough to be interesting and knits up very fast. I made the first ones while I was on a work trip to kill time while traveling. As I was getting off the plane to go home, a woman behind me in the aisle tapped my shoulder.

She said, “I’ve been watching you since the terminal, and I have to know: are you really knitting a heart?” I gave her one I’d finished the night before.

Since then, my heart project has become its own thing. I’ve knitted literally hundreds, on 000s with lace weight and on 6s with worsted, and with most things in between. I put lavender, fiberfill, and a chip of howlite (to aid those struggling with destructive ties to the past) in each one.

I took 100 to the regional Burning Man event as my gift to the festival. I knitted 80 as part of the favors for my wedding in 2017. The rest I’ve given away—some to close friends, but most to people I encounter at random.

I can often tell who needs a heart, and each gifting becomes a connection with a cool human:

the knitting lady who told me I was doing a good job when I was knitting in public, trying to master cables;

the woman who treated size-28 me like a normal bride and convinced me it was worth it not to let him see the dress beforehand (she was right);

the emergency doctor with whom I had a strangely intimate conversation as she cut into my finger to drain an infected compartment;

the guy running a knitting shop in Barcelona, who held it up to his chest, mimed it beating, and said “clack-clack”;

the woman leaving her abusive boyfriend, who kept the heart in her hand until we reached the train station in Portland;

and so many others. I often hear, “You have no idea how much I needed this.”

That’s why I keep doing it. It brings so much light into my life.

A few years ago, I was in an intensive outpatient psych program. Most people brought gifts for everyone on their last night, and when it was my turn, I gave each person a little white box with a heart sticker on top. Inside was a little heart nestled in tissue paper. A woman I’d had difficulty with at first but had come to really like wrote a Cummings quote on the whiteboard:

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)

I cried.

Hearts are how I say, “I see who you are, and it makes me happy.”