Crochet and Chaos: A Neurospicy Mountain Tale

Hooked on Sanity: How Crochet Saved My Overthinking Brain

Hi, I’m Shan — mum of three, living halfway up a mountain in North Wales, powered mostly by tea, sarcasm, and the faint hope of five minutes’ peace. I’ve got a high-pressure job that eats brains for breakfast, and last year, when my body finally tapped out and told me to sit the hell down, I found myself doing something unexpected: I picked up a crochet hook.

Now, I hadn’t crocheted properly since I was eleven — back when I thought I was destined to make a scarf and ended up with something that looked like it had survived a small explosion. But there’s nothing like a good bout of illness and a mid-life existential crisis to make you think, “You know what would fix this? Yarn.”

So, I gave it another go.

Fast-forward almost a year and I’m still here, still crocheting, still living on this windy Welsh mountain surrounded by sheep that look at me like I’m completely unhinged. And honestly, they’re not wrong. Because somewhere between my first wobbly granny square and my twentieth unfinished project, I realised crochet wasn’t just a craft — it was therapy, meditation, and rebellion all rolled into one tangled ball of double-knit.

There’s something beautifully grounding about it. My hands move, my brain slows down, and for once I’m not mentally writing tomorrow’s to-do list while cooking tea and answering work emails. Crochet is mindfulness disguised as chaos — and as someone whose neurodiversity comes with a side order of Olympic-level overthinking, that’s a bloody miracle.

It’s also taught me patience. (Well, kind of.) There’s nothing like frogging an entire jumper at 1 a.m. because you “just noticed” you skipped a stitch 47 rows ago to really test your character. But it’s worth it. Every stitch is a tiny act of calm in a brain that rarely sits still.

And it’s fun. Not in a “Pinterest-perfect, pastel flat-lay” way, but in a “let’s see what happens if I mix neon pink with moss green and make something that looks like it crawled out of Glastonbury” kind of way. I love indie, I love original, and I love things that make people tilt their heads and go, “Huh… that’s different.”

That’s the joy of it — there are no rules. You can be messy, experimental, and gloriously yourself. My mountain studio (read: spare room with bad lighting) is now filled with yarn, weird little crochet creatures, and an ever-growing sense that I’m doing something that’s mine.

Crochet became my way to switch off, to reconnect, to remind myself that not everything has to be productive or perfect. Sometimes, the best thing you can make is a bit of space in your own head.

So yeah — I might not be “healed” or “balanced” or whatever Instagram’s selling this week. But I’ve got my hook, my yarn, and a brain that’s just a little quieter than before. And honestly? That’s enough.