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Tag Archives: Knitting

Learning to Be Relaxed

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Tonight I am, against all odds, relaxed.*

Not “scrolling while pretending to unwind.” Not “strategically multitasking rest.” Just… sitting. Knitting. Listening to music. Existing.

And because my brain can’t leave well enough alone, I went to find a better word for how I’m feeling.** Something more poetic, more dramatic, more me. I opened a thesaurus. It said: relaxed.

No italics, no fanfare. Just the word itself, sitting there like it’s the simplest thing in the world.

The Discovery

If this is what relaxed actually feels like, I’ve been doing it wrong most of my life.

I used to think relaxation was something you earned. A reward you got once the to-do list was vanquished and the inbox quieted down. But rest never arrived that way. I’d tick everything off, sit down, and immediately invent a new list. My brain treats stillness like a threat; if it’s quiet, something must be wrong.

So instead, I chased productive calm. The kind where you’re “resting” but also meal-planning, doom-scrolling, and mentally preparing for the next 72 hours. It looks like downtime. It isn’t.

The Practice

Somewhere in the last six months, between shared kitchens and quiet evenings, I stumbled into this new kind of calm. The small, low-effort, no-explanation kind.

No scented candles. No meditation apps telling me to breathe. Just music, yarn, and enough mental space to stop narrating my every thought like another of my podcasts that no one subscribed to.

I’ve also been sober through all of this. Not in a manifesto way, more in a “let’s see what happens if I actually feel my feelings” way. Turns out, I don’t need wine*** to be introspective. Just wool and Wi-Fi.

And I’ve been med-free too, so really, a totally relaxed person with cPTSD is breaking the million-to-one odds here. Someone call Guinness.****

There’s something deeply strange about feeling your nervous system unclench for what might be the first time in years. It’s not euphoric. It’s not cinematic. It’s just… relaxing. Ordinary. Like slipping into a bath that’s finally the right temperature.

The Joke

I always expect tension to tap me on the shoulder. My brain whispers, Shouldn’t you be doing something?
And I usually answer, probably.

That’s how you know you’re relaxing: by the low-level guilt that you’ve kicked your responsibilities into the long grass.

But not this time. This time, there’s just an unfamiliar feeling of quiet. One I had to slowly, silently move through the long grass to glimpse before it startled and fled.

The Aggressively Peaceful Bit

It’s funny. I’ve spent years chasing chaos, noise, novelty; things that make me feel alive. Turns out, being alive feels a lot like this too. The quiet, unremarkable kind of joy that doesn’t need documenting*****, scheduling, or justifying.

So yeah. I’m relaxed.

Apparently, that’s a whole new skill. And I think I might commit to this hobby for a while.

*Well not right now, sorry to spoil the illusion, but right now I’m on an early train, wishing I’d packed earlier and gotten more sleep. But that’s another story.

**If I’m honest, the only reason I even thought to look it up is because I was trying to document it. That’s what alexithymia does: it makes me name feelings so I can recognise them later. I wanted a word to pin this one down.


***I never liked wine. It just has good alliteration with wool and Wi-Fi.


****I never liked stout either.

*****Ssshhh, I know this is documenting. Leave me to my fun.

Knitting Is My Favorite Distraction

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“First you need to take the yarn in your right hand…“

I didn’t go to a class, or learn from a wise relative passing down ancient yarn secrets. I learned to knit from YouTube — which means my teachers were mostly disembodied hands with suspiciously good manicures.

I was pregnant with my first child, and I wanted to make a baby blanket. It’s so cliche it cool. The blanket was simple, except I choose to do colourwork too, because I can’t possibly start with something plain. It was finished before my baby was born, but did not survive contact with the babies dad putting it directly into the washing machine. Wool on a regular wash. Dear Reader, I cried.

Somehow, despite the destruction of my first finished item, I’m actually pretty good at it. My stitches are neat. My tension’s solid. I’ve tackled socks, lace, different types of colourwork. All the things that make non-knitters look at you like you’ve just solved a maths equation in your head, no problem mate, done it.

The Strange Fate of Finished Objects

Here’s the thing though: I rarely wear or keep anything I make. I can knit a pair of socks that fit perfectly, and then hand them over to someone else like they’re a disposable coffee cup. Scarves, hats, mittens — they all wander off to other people’s wardrobes, while mine remains conspicuously empty of anything I’ve actually made.

The four finished items* in the photo at at the top, all completed in 2024, all about to go off to other people this month**. One will be a birthday gift for someone’s mum, another sent further north to keep a neck warm, one posted onwards to decorate the back of an armchair, and the last to a teenager who is just excited to get a handmade item.

Why Knitting Stuck (When Other Things Didn’t)

There’s something about the rhythm of it that works on my brain in a way most “self-care” activities don’t.

Running collapsed under the weight of one very soggy marathon. Journaling can be as much a way to blame myself for things, as it is a way to off load things that are eating up my mental RAM. And stretching? That’s just me having an argument with my hips***.

But knitting? Knitting sticks. Even when I put it down for months, I always pick it back up, and it always feels like coming back to something useful.

Not Quite Useful, But Definitely Mine

It doesn’t “heal” me. It doesn’t “fix” me. But it does give my restless hands something to do, and my restless mind a puzzle to chew on. There’s a similar metronome of movement that I once found in running, giving me a small pocket of quiet in my brain. It fends off the existential dread with a mantra of “knit, knit, purl.”

Not all hobbies have to be deep and meaningful. Sometimes it’s just loops of yarn and a bit of distraction, and that’s enough.

So yes, I’m self-taught, I’m good at it, and yet my drawers are mostly full of yarn waiting for it’s moment rather than finished objects… because god forbid I ever keep something nice for myself.****

*Yes, two of those finished items are crochet. Don’t be picky.

**No, I’ve not sold them. I don’t need to make money of this, and to be honest the admin of someone covering the cost of the yarn is simply not something I give a fuck about. You like the item? Great. Take it. Enjoy.

***The second child caused that hip problem. I knit them a blanket too. It was much simpler than the first one I made, but did have a cute hood.

****This is probably something I need to think more about.