About half-way through my freshman year of high school I decided to pick up knitting. My mom suggested it to me in passing, and with nothing better to do I grabbed a pair of wood chopsticks, a random skein of yarn, and without watching a single YouTube tutorial, I started to knit. It was fairly easy for me to pick up and even though I was doing it completely wrong, I really enjoyed the craft, and often found myself doing it between studying for school. However I hadn’t yet realized its impact on my life. A few months after picking up knitting, COVID-19 lockdown began.

Like most high school students at that time I was at first very excited to get two weeks off of school and very happy to get a break from homework and exams. But as we all know, the two week lockdown turned into three weeks, then a month, then two months, then three months, and so on. The excitement over the lockdown quickly wore off as the dread of the political and social state of the world had become too big to ignore. No amount of T.V, YouTube, or texting my friends could distract me. I stopped going on social media, stopped watching the news, and failed to keep up with my friends. I know these experiences are not exclusive to me. I know many people can relate to the deep isolation we had felt, and still deal with during and since the pandemic. A study published by Harvard’s Making Caring Common Project states; “In our recent national survey of American adults, 36% of respondents reported serious loneliness—feeling lonely ‘frequently’ or ‘almost all the time or all the time’ in the four weeks prior to the survey.” and “43% of young adults reported increases in loneliness since the outbreak of the pandemic.” While everyone else my age was doom scrolling through Tik Tok and having Zoom chats, I was knitting.

I couldn’t tell you at the time why a craft I found mildly enjoyable was taking over my life, but in hindsight, I just needed something to do that wasn’t looking at my phone or computer. I needed something to bury my head into, and that just so happened to be some teal colored yarn and a pair of chopsticks. But those chopsticks became metal needles and the scrap yarn became one pound skeins of multi colored acrylic. I’d sit in my room for hours just knitting a square piece of fabric and finally learning how to do it correctly after many hours of YouTube tutorials. But after a while the clanking of metal needles and the limiting variety of things to knit had become dissatisfying. This didn’t mean I was done being a fiber artist, as I quickly shifted from a needle to a hook.

After watching hundreds of videos on knitting, it was inevitable that crochet content would end up on my recommended page. At first I was sort of intimidated by the more complicated stitches and techniques used to make the crochet pieces, but that didn’t stop me from ordering the first set of hooks I saw on Amazon. I started crocheting the night I got my hooks and pretty much did the same thing I did while knitting, making squares of fabric with the most basic stitch. But despite that, I felt a compelling difference between the two. I didn’t know why but I think it had something to do with how you make the stitches and how rewarding I found them to be.

With knitting you’re just creating loops and loops of yarn and it’s very easy for your brain to zone out and muscle memory to come in to finish the project. But single stitches in crochet are far more “involved.” Even when you have it memorized, there is still more attention needed to crochet even the most basic stitches and patterns. I found this more precise art form to be far more rewarding as over time I could see my stitches become more uniform and the shapes I was making become less deformed. I also felt it to be more personal because the focus I was putting on each stitch made it so I could look at whatever I made and feel extremely accomplished, not just for the piece overall, but each individual stitch and knot.

Crochet wasn’t just a fun craft for me; it very quickly became the only way I could cope with the depressing world the lockdown created. Whenever I felt myself spiraling down in an anxiety induced panic or surrounded in a heavy fog of depression, the rhythmic cycle of stitch after stitch after stitch kept me in place. It was a way to turn my brain off and just focus on what was in front of me: an aluminum five millimeter size hook, and the making of a blue teddy bear. It was a sort of mindset, an invisible bubble of ease that crochet would slip me into. I think The Guardian writer Lucianne Tonti put it best when she described it as a “flow state” saying, “Activities that are challenging but not overwhelming, stressful or heavy are the path to flow. - in flow, thoughts and movements should come naturally and feel pleasurable and joyful.”

After the lockdown was lifted, I started to become more invested in the crochet/knitting community, both in real life and online. I was surprised to see how many people were drawn to crochet for the same reasons I was. In April of 2020, a group of Australian researchers sent out an online survey to gather information on the mental health effects of knitting/crochet, and published their findings to The Royal Society for Public Health. After six weeks, eight thousand people had taken the survey. The feelings of accomplishment, relaxation, and anxiety relief were common threads in the responses and the researchers concluded that, “crochet offers positive benefits for personal wellbeing with many respondents actively using crochet to manage mental health conditions and life events.” This was a really important realization for me to have, as I had a very difficult time regaining friends and social connections after the pandemic. So finding a community of people who have a shared experience and are open to having a conversation about it really helped me heal after being isolated for so long.

Since then, my relationship with crochet has changed. I still find the work to be meditative, but it has also become my main art form. I find myself going to crochet not just from a meditative perspective, but from an artistic one. Whether it be a skeleton sweater for halloween, a birthday gift for my cousin or giant star blanket made out of yarn from an old sweater, I enjoy finding inspiration and pushing what I can do with crochet. Going online and finding new and interesting stitches and patterns to try and experimenting with shapes and yarn types has really expanded my perspective on what crochet is and what kind of art form it can be.

I couldn’t have realized it at the time and it’s almost silly to say, but my mom suggesting I knit in passing has completely changed me and my relationship with myself. I wouldn’t have the same relationship or understanding of my mental health, I wouldn’t have found a community I can relate to, and I wouldn’t have found my artistic voice if it wasn’t for that wooden pair of chopsticks and random skein of yarn.