What I Gave Up — And What I Crocheted Instead

There’s a particular kind of restlessness that sets in around year three of a habit you never consciously chose. For me, it was scrolling. Not the casual, occasionally delightful kind of scrolling that leads you to a recipe you’ll actually make or a video of a dog learning to swim. I’m talking about the hollow, automatic kind — the thumb-flicking marathon that eats two hours before you’ve registered that you sat down. One Tuesday evening, I looked up from my phone and realized I had no memory of the last forty-five minutes. I hadn’t laughed. I hadn’t learned anything. I had simply… disappeared.

That was the night I picked up a crochet hook for the first time in over a decade.

What followed wasn’t some perfectly curated wellness transformation. I didn’t lose twenty pounds or launch a small business or develop a serenity so profound it unnerved my family. What I did do was give up a handful of things — some big, some embarrassingly small — and replace them with something made of yarn and repetition and a quiet kind of joy I hadn’t known I was missing. This is that story.

What I Actually Gave Up

Let me be clear: I’m not going to tell you I gave up alcohol or sugar or television, because that would be misleading. I gave up things that were smaller in reputation but larger in the space they occupied in my daily life.

I gave up the scroll.

Not entirely — I’m not living in a cabin. But I gave up the reflexive, purposeless kind. The kind you do because your hands need something to do and your brain wants stimulation but not too much stimulation. The kind that leaves you feeling vaguely guilty and overstimulated at the same time, like you ate an entire bag of chips in the dark.

Crochet fixed this not through willpower but through substitution. You cannot crochet and scroll simultaneously. Anyone who tells you otherwise is working on a very simple stitch and probably dropping it constantly. When your hands are occupied with hook and yarn, they are not available for the phone. It sounds stupidly simple. It is stupidly simple. That doesn’t make it any less true.

I gave up falling asleep to true crime podcasts.

For a shamefully long time, my bedtime routine involved lying in the dark listening to someone describe, in careful and occasionally graphic detail, the worst things human beings have done to each other. I told myself it was interesting. It was interesting. It was also, in retrospect, not the ideal input for a brain trying to transition into rest.

Crochet gave me something else for the evening hours: a granny square to finish, a row to count, a new stitch to practice before bed. My hands worked slowly, almost sleepily, and my brain followed. I still listen to podcasts — I just switched to ones about history and language and the occasional deep dive into how something ordinary was invented — and my sleep, which I hadn’t realized was genuinely poor, improved in a way that surprised me.

I gave up buying things I didn’t need because I was bored.

This one is harder to admit because it sounds like a financial confession, and it partly is. Boredom shopping — the late-night add-to-cart phenomenon — was costing me more than I’d tracked. Not a devastating amount, but a consistent, low-grade drain on both money and physical space. Little things: a kitchen gadget I’d use once, a book I’d never open, a throw pillow that turned out to be a slightly different color than it looked on screen.

Yarn shopping is not immune to this same impulse, and I won’t pretend it is. But there’s a difference between buying yarn to make something and buying a random object to fill a vague, unexamined need. When I bought yarn, I bought it with a project in mind. The object would become something. I would make it. That loop — intention, process, result — changed the texture of the purchase entirely.

I gave up the feeling that my leisure time needed to be productive in a legible way.

This might be the most important thing on the list, and the most paradoxical, because crochet is literally productive. You end up with objects. But the mindset shift came from somewhere unexpected: the middle of a project, when you’re not starting and not finishing but simply working, stitch after stitch, with no milestone in sight. That middle place — which our productivity-obsessed culture has very little patience for — turned out to be exactly what I needed. I gave up the habit of measuring my rest by what it produced, and I replaced it with the experience of a process that was its own justification.

What I Crocheted Instead

Now for the actual yarn part, because this is not just a philosophical meditation — there are real finished objects involved, and some of them are genuinely useful.

Dishcloths, and the unexpected pleasure of the utilitarian.

I started, as most people do, with something small and forgiving. Dishcloths are the perfect beginner project: they don’t need to be a specific size, the material is cheap, tension irregularities don’t matter much, and if you mess one up it becomes a rag. I made approximately eleven dishcloths in my first month. My kitchen was better equipped than it had ever been. My grandmother, who crochets with a speed and confidence that I find slightly intimidating, said mine were “coming along nicely,” which from her is practically a standing ovation.

But beyond the utility, there was something deeply satisfying about making the mundane. Every time I washed dishes with something my hands had made, there was a small, quiet pleasure that no Amazon delivery had ever given me. The dishcloth knew nothing of my effort, but I did.

A hat that took four attempts.

After dishcloths, I decided I was ready for something three-dimensional, which is where crochet reveals its learning curve. A hat, I thought. How hard can it be? Very hard, as it turned out, for me specifically, at that particular moment in my skill development. The first attempt was a disk. The second attempt was a cone. The third attempt looked like a hat but fit my head in a way that suggested I had misunderstood the concept of a human skull. The fourth one was good. I wore it for the entire winter, not because it was the warmest hat I owned but because I had made it with my own hands after failing three times, and that felt worth celebrating through continued wear.

The hat taught me something about frustration that I’ve carried into other areas of my life: the version that doesn’t work is not evidence that you should stop. It is evidence that you’re in the middle of learning. The middle is supposed to be uncomfortable.

A blanket that became a project about patience.

Somewhere around month four, I made the classic beginner’s mistake of starting a blanket. Not a small lap blanket. A blanket-blanket. The kind that, once finished, would legitimately cover a queen-sized bed and represent many hundreds of yards of yarn and dozens of hours of work. I chose a simple but pretty stitch — the moss stitch, which is a satisfying alternation of single crochets and chains — and I bought an amount of yarn that filled an entire tote bag.

I am still working on this blanket. I have been working on it for a while. This is not a failure; this is the nature of large projects, and I’ve made my peace with it. What the blanket gave me — is still giving me — is a long-term relationship with a single object. There’s something almost meditative about returning to the same project week after week, watching it grow incrementally, having no choice but to trust the process because there is no shortcut to a blanket. You simply have to make every row.

In a world that celebrates speed and instant results, a blanket is a quiet act of resistance.

Small gifts, and the rediscovery of giving.

Around the holidays, I made gifts for the first time in years. A set of coasters for my sister. A small stuffed cactus for my niece, who had expressed exactly once that she liked cacti, and who I hoped would find the yarn version acceptable given that the real version would require me to keep a plant alive. A pair of fingerless mitts for a friend who is always cold in her office.

None of these were perfect. The coasters were slightly uneven. The cactus had a lean to it that gave it personality, I chose to believe. The mitts had one thumb hole marginally larger than the other. But every single person who received a handmade gift said something that no store-bought present had ever prompted: they said, “You made this?” And in that question was an entire conversation about time and attention and the fact that I had thought of them specifically, chosen a project for them specifically, worked on it with them in mind.

Gift-giving became something different than it had been. It became an act that started weeks earlier, in the choosing of yarn and the working of stitches, and that made the giving itself feel more complete.

A granny square sampler that taught me color.

I want to talk about color for a moment, because this is something crochet gave me that I didn’t expect. I had never considered myself particularly visually creative. I bought clothes in neutrals. My home was decorated in what I’d describe as “cautious beige.” But when you’re standing in a yarn shop holding two skeins and deciding whether they belong together, you are suddenly and inescapably in a conversation with your own aesthetic instincts.

I made a sampler of granny squares — twelve different squares, all using the same basic structure but experimenting with different color combinations. Some of the combinations were good. A few were surprisingly, genuinely beautiful. One was a disaster involving an orange I should have put back on the shelf. But I made all of them, and by the end of the project, I had opinions about color that I hadn’t had before. Strong ones. I started noticing color everywhere — in packaging, in paintings, in the way certain light hits certain walls. Crochet had opened a small door in my perception that I’ve never entirely closed.

What This Practice Actually Changed

I want to be careful here not to oversell, because the internet is full of people who found one thing that changed their life and now believe it will change yours, and I find that exhausting to read. Crochet is not a cure for anything serious. It won’t fix structural problems or process grief on your behalf or substitute for therapy or medication or the things that actually require professional help.

But it did do some things, and I think they’re worth naming.

It gave me an experience of flow. That psychological state where you’re absorbed enough in something that time reorganizes itself, where you’re neither bored nor anxious but simply present and engaged — I had lost access to it. Crochet gave it back. Not every session, not dramatically, but reliably enough that I began to seek it out.

It gave me a relationship with imperfection that I’d been missing. Crochet is full of small errors. You drop a stitch, you miscounted a row, your tension went weird in the middle of a section because you were stressed about something unrelated. The object absorbs all of this and is still an object, still useful, still made by your hands. There is a tolerance for imperfection built into the craft that I’ve had to practice extending to other areas of my life, with mixed but real results.

It gave me a community I didn’t know existed. Online crochet communities — the forums, the project-sharing platforms, the pattern designers who post tutorials with a warmth and patience that seems genuinely characteristic of the craft — are among the more cheerful corners of the internet. People share what they’re working on. They ask for help with stitches. They post pictures of finished objects next to clearly delighted pets. I became a peripheral member of this world, lurking more than participating, but finding it a reliable source of goodwill in a digital landscape that can feel short on it.

And it gave me something made. Something that hadn’t existed before and now does, because I made it, with my own hands, out of patience and practice and the accumulated lessons of every failed attempt that came before. There’s a permanence to that which I find quietly sustaining. The dishcloths exist. The hat exists. The blanket, though unfinished, is being made into existence row by row. These are small contributions to the world’s inventory of objects, and they are entirely mine.

A Note for Anyone Considering It

If you’re curious about crochet and haven’t tried it, the barrier to entry is genuinely low. A basic crochet hook costs almost nothing. A skein of yarn to practice with costs a few dollars. There are free tutorials on YouTube that will take you from complete beginner to functional stitches in an afternoon. You will not be good at first. The first few rows will be tight and uneven and confusing. That’s not a sign that you lack talent; it’s a sign that you’re learning something that requires hand-muscle memory you don’t have yet.

Start with a dishcloth. Make it out of cotton yarn, which is easier to see and work with than wool when you’re starting. Don’t worry about tension. Don’t worry about gauge. Just learn the stitches first, and let the object be whatever shape it turns out to be. When you’ve made a few, you’ll have the foundation for almost everything else the craft offers.

And if you find yourself, a few months in, with a pile of lopsided but functional objects and a vague but persistent sense that your hands know something useful now — welcome. It’s a good place to be.

The Tuesday evening when I picked up the hook, I wasn’t looking for a hobby. I was looking for somewhere to put my hands, and my attention, and the restlessness that the scroll had been feeding without ever satisfying. What I found was something older and slower and more forgiving than I expected — a practice that meets you wherever you are and asks only that you show up, count your stitches, and keep going.

That turns out to be enough. Most nights, it’s exactly enough.