Apoptosis

As a child you have imaginary friends. As an adult--well, perhaps you shouldn't. Or, more likely, you have imaginary friends that are real people. Not the people as they are, but the people as your mind makes them, interacts with them. Sometimes this can happen in knitting too.

If the project is off, you can keep knitting and blame reality at the end. Or you can accept the truth and try to use the actual parameters available as a basis for reconsideration:

When you're a child you escape by going to imaginary places in the mind. As an adult, you've been places, you just revisit them mentally. As a knitter you rip and reknit. With some blocking-in-the-wild to check your hypothesis.