Not surprising. I’m often early, otherwise I get sidetracked and show up late.

So I fill the waiting with knitting.

Needles moving with that familiar rhythm that’s carried me through more situations than I can count.

Three hours later, I had a diagnosis.

Autistic and ADHD.

At 33.

Since that day, I’ve been feeling off.

It’s not just me. Other neurodivergent people have told me that a late diagnosis doesn’t always immediately bring clarity.

It’s a looking-back.

All those years of white-knuckling through draining situations.

The way I’d emerge from social events completely emptied.

The hyperfocus dives into projects everyone said were “too hard”—not because I was ambitious, but because complex patterns held my attention in ways simple ones couldn’t.

Knitting has always been my regulation tool. The perfect stim before I even knew the word, let alone my need for it.

Last newsletter I shared the system I use to sort projects by energy — the KATE (Knitting According To Energy) 9‑Grid.

I thought it was just an organizational tool.

A 3×3 grid that sorts projects not by progress or deadline, but by what kind of energy they ask from me and where I’ll be when I knit them.

• Cognitive demand (how much focus does this pattern require?):

  • Mindless—rhythmic, automatic, easy to memorize

  • Middling—some chart-checking, light attention

  • Mindful—full engagement, no autopilot

• Context (where am I knitting this?):

  • Portable—fits in a purse and doesn’t get tangled

  • Neutral—knit night, couch, doctor’s waiting room

  • Homebound—needs space, careful yarn management, or my full kit

I thought I was just being organized.

Turns out I was managing my nervous system.

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Since the diagnosis, I’ve been thinking about what “designed for neurodivergent knitters” could actually look like.

Not patterns that just happen to work for us.

Patterns built with us in mind from the start, from how the project feels to knit all the way through how it feels to wear.

So here’s a concept I’m calling the Neurodivergent Make Nine—a collection that maps onto the KATE grid, with sensory considerations and self-regulation features built into the design.

Here’s the thing about the details I’ve outlined here. The thumbholes aren’t aesthetic. The beads aren’t just accents.

They’re sensory.

I’m not the only ND person who has a thing for thumbholes, right?

Maybe it’s something about that specific pressure on the wrist, or the way they anchor sleeves in place. Whatever it is, it’s a pattern I’ve noticed.

The beaded fidgets are a more experimental idea.

I’m imagining beads applied to the cuff or palm in a way that makes them spinnable—durable enough to survive actual fidgeting, positioned where your fingers naturally rest.

Built-in regulation you can wear without anyone knowing.

Every pattern would include sensory yarn recommendations. Not just weight and fiber, but texture notes.

The softest, itch-free mohair if you want cozy. A non-fuzzy alternative if that’s not your vibe. What the yarn feels like running through your fingers, and of course, how it feels when you wear it.

This is all concept right now.

Nothing’s drafted.

I’m sharing it because I want to know if it resonates.

Do beads on the palm for fidgeting feel like something you’d want?

What’s your version of the thumbhole thing?

If this sounds like something you’d knit—or something you’d want to help shape—I want to hear from you.

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I’ll be honest: I’ve struggled to knit since the diagnosis.

Not even sure why exactly, except that I’ve struggled to do *anything.*

The world got turned upside-down, and my hands forgot how to reach for the needles.

But between challenge and keeping two mindless projects on the needles, I’ve made myself knit at least a row a day.

And you know?

Those have been some of the most grounded, stable moments of these days since everything started to feel turned upside-down.

Maybe that’s the point.

Not the finished objects. Not the progress photos.

Just the act of regulation, stitch by stitch, while everything else settles.

Soon I want to share my personal Make Nine for the year. The actual projects on my needles.

But this week, I wanted to share the vision that’s been on my mind—what knitting designed for brains like ours could look like.

If you’re here because you found this through the ND knitting community, I’d love to hear what you think of all this.

We’re building something.

One row at a time.

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Even though I hadn’t knit much more than fingerless mitts and a garter stitch sweater, I was an accomplished sewn-garment designer. I drafted patterns, sewed them up myself, and built full looks. That year I had set my heart on a fashion runway and I needed a piece of that outfit to hold a special weight.

Quiet weight.

I fell in love with a Shetland lace shawl design. Not because it was sensible. Certainly not because it matched my skill level.

I fell in love because the lace designs had exactly the level of delicate detail that I needed to pair with the red coat and simple dress that would make up the rest of the ensemble.

So I taught myself to knit lace by knitting lace.

Later I realized that these were intermediate-to-advanced charts I was teaching myself from. I turned them into a simple lace camisole/corset sort of top. Slow stitches. Full focus. Absolute absorption.

And it worked.

That ensemble was invited to the fashion runway at the American Sheep Industry’s Annual Convention, and then the lace piece was singled out by the Mohair Council of America for special recognition as well.

Such a complex project worked so well not because the project was easy, but because the mode was right when I set about to work on it.

I could hold complexity then.
I had room for it.

I could make the jump in skill that I needed to because I was already in highly-detailed-focus-mode from the tailoring of the rest of the outfit.

If I’d restricted myself to knitting patterns that matched “my current skill level,” that lace top would never have existed.

That wasn’t the last time I questioned the helpfulness of skill-level classification.

The question we keep asking

Easy or hard.
Beginner or advanced.

It sounds helpful, but it assumes “difficulty” is the limiting factor when most of the time, it isn’t.

What actually determines whether a project feels possible is energy.

Energy as in attention.
Cognitive bandwidth.
Sensory tolerance.
Whether your body and brain have the resources that the knitting will require.

That’s why the same project can feel effortless one day and impossible the next.

It’s not that you suddenly got less skilled.

Your energy changed.

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Introducing KATE

To make sense of fit, I use a map.

I call it the KATE (Knitting According To Energy) 9-Grid.

It replaces difficulty labels with two questions that matter more:

• How much focus does this project require?

• How portable is the project?

That’s it.

Two axes. Nine squares. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Axis 1: Cognitive load (mindless → middling → mindful)

This is about attention requirements, not skill.

• Mindless: predictable rhythm, low tracking cost, highly interruptible

• Middling: some tracking, interruptions are recoverable

• Mindful: sustained attention, interruptions have a real cost

Axis 2: Environment fit (sociable → neutral → homebound)

This is about whether or not the project can travel with me.

• Sociable: portable, limited pattern/chart/yarn management, good for outings

• Neutral: portable-ish, best when you can sit and settle like at knit night

• Homebound: happiest at home because of size, tools, yarn management, etc

If you can picture those two axes, you can already place most projects.

A few quick examples (I’ll share even more in next week’s post):

• Mindless + Homebound is a simple but sprawling afghan. You’re not going to pack it along to work on in a waiting room, but it doesn’t require a lot of focus. Good TV knitting tends to end up in this category.

• Mindful + Sociable = That complex sock that’s perfect for bringing along on your commute where you know you’ll be sitting, uninterrupted. Totally portable, but impossible to carry on a conversation while knitting.

• Mindless + Sociable knits tend to be the simplest of all. The vanilla sock you can practically knit in your sleep. The easy-to-memorize scarf pattern. Anything you can take with you and chat with friends over without dropping a stitch.

Fit, not mismatch

Problems don’t show up because a project is “too advanced.”

They show up because it’s a poor fit.

A simple stockinette hat can be perfect when you need something mindless and sociable — something to throw in your bag and knit in public.

But later that night, when you’re winding down and your brain wants somewhere to land, that same simple hat can feel like trying to eat plain crackers when what you need is real food.

That’s when a lace shawl might come out. Not to prove your skills, but to meet your attention where it is.

Reverse the contexts and it’s just as bad.

If you take that lace shawl to knit night without a lifeline you’ll spend more time recovering from interruptions than enjoying the knitting.

Bring it home.

Leave it laid out.

Let it be do-not-disturb knitting.

So often we try to fit our mood to the WIP that just happens to be on our needles.

The grid lets fit flow the other way.

This is not a productivity framework

The goal of this 9-grid isn’t to help you finish more projects.

It’s not for optimizing your output. It’s not meant to be a system for “getting more done.”

If anything, it does the opposite.

It gives you permission to stop forcing a project to behave in the wrong environment.

When something stalls, instead of asking What’s wrong with me? you can ask:

Where does this project belong right now?

Sometimes the answer is:

Not here.
Not now.

That’s not failure. It’s information.

Place your projects with me

Every project lives somewhere on the grid.

Tell me about something you have on your needles right now:

• How much attention does it ask of you?

• Where does it want to live—at home, or a portable project bag?

You might notice you already do this instinctively: socks for your purse, sweaters for the couch, lace for quiet mornings.

The 9-Grid just gives language to what your body already knows.

I want to hear about it.

Leave a comment with what you’re knitting and where you’d place it on the grid (mindless/middling/mindful × sociable/neutral/homebound).

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Bonus points for indie patterns, especially if you’re the designer. I’ll feature a few reader examples in next week’s post when I share my own make-nine based on KATE.

Sitting in the cold waiting room—low chairs, fluorescent lights, and that quiet tension that settles any time I’m early for an appointment I don’t really want to have.

My hands were moving before the dog guided his companion to the desk.

Wool through fingers. Wooden needles swishing. A simple rhythm I didn’t have to think about.

I’d prepared for this morning the way I always do. Scripting the small talk. Where to look if conversation stalled. How to sit without drawing attention or inviting interaction.

What I hadn’t prepared for was the dog.

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When a therapy dog in a vest comes in, usually the problem people have is keeping themselves from petting him without permission—but not for me.

This poor dog happened to be a breed I’m afraid of.

Through no fault of his own friendly self, I felt the immediate tightening in my chest reminiscent of that day I was in the middle of a canine attack. The hyper-awareness that makes my body take a half-step back even when I’m sitting down.

Ordinarily I’d seriously consider going to wait outside or take a trip to the bathroom.

But my hands were already busy.

The anxiety had somewhere to go.

I didn’t need to reach for a grounding technique from a therapist or scan the room for exits. My fingers were already moving, letting the panicked buzz flow into the stitches and out of my shaking hands.

My eyes stayed down, not awkwardly in my lap, not locked onto the dog in that way that makes them smell fear.

Just knitting.

No one wondered why.
No one asked if I was okay.
I didn’t have to explain myself.

There was nothing to explain.

Anxiety doesn’t start in the head

We often talk about anxiety as if it’s a problem of thought. That’s what “mental” means after all, and anxiety is classified as a mental health problem.

“It’s in your head.” As if the right mindset or explanation could talk the bodily experience out of it.

But for me, anxiety shows up physically before it can dream of being an articulated thought. It tightens my jaw. Makes my pulse throb in my ears. Sharpens my hearing, precariously stacking every chaotic sound on top of the next.

By the time my thoughts start racing, my nervous system has already decided I’m not safe.

Logic arrives too late.

What helps is a sensory focus point that speaks the body’s language instead.

Movement. Texture. Repetition.

Knitting offers all of that without asking for attention.

Texture as grounding

Wool matters.

Not just any yarn. Wool that still carries a hint of lanolin is my favorite. That soft drag even against dry hands. The kind that makes my skin feel better and better as I work with it.

Wooden needles matter too. The kind that warm as they’re worked with and don’t bend when they do. Smooth, but with just enough grip that nothing slips when my hands start to shake.

Synthetic yarn makes my skin crawl. Metal needles make me feel every harsh click down to my bones. And don’t get me started on plastic.

Texture isn’t a question of preference here.

It’s information.

My hands read the world through touch long before my brain can make sense of it. Knitting gives that sensitivity somewhere reliable to land.

Movement without masking

When I was a child, stimming wasn’t acceptable.

I was a verbal stimmer, an auditory one. Making noise helped me regulate, but it also made me stand out. “Annoying,” I was told.

So I learned to be still.

Too still.

The movement didn’t go away. It just turned inward, into buzzing and agitation hidden by an unnatural, stoic silence that eventually collapsed into shutdown.

Knitting let me move again.

For me, it functions the same way stimming does for many autistic people: repetitive, self-soothing motion that regulates sensory input, thoughts, and emotion.

Knitting is the perfect stim

Unlike many stims or fidgets, knitting doesn’t draw negative scrutiny.

It’s socially legible.

An adult with yarn and needles doesn’t raise questions like a brightly-colored sensory toy does. With knitting, hands moving are expected, eyes down are acceptable, and silence doesn’t read as avoidance.

That matters.

Especially in moments when anxiety is already high, the last thing I need is to manage other people’s reactions to how I cope.

Knitting means I don’t have to perform calmness.

I don’t have to use the excuse of a bathroom break to escape the waiting room. I don’t have to pretend the dog isn’t there.

I can stay.

Even if people stare, they’re not staring at my weirdness—they’re either in awe of the creative power of my fingers, or they’re wishing they’d brought their project bag too.

Not a coping mechanism

This is why knitting doesn’t feel like a grounding technique to me.

Such techniques feel reactive—a tool to deploy once anxiety has already taken over.

They ask me to override what my body is doing. Control my breathing. Count sensations. Prove I’m calming down.

That kind of self-control feels too much like shutdown.

Knitting is different.

It’s a practice that changes the terrain before anxiety peaks, a place my body already knows how to return to.

It’s not moving away from fear.

It’s moving back into a place I already know and love, a place I want to be in whether I’m feeling anxious or not.

Staying without explaining

In that waiting room, I didn’t overcome my anxiety. I didn’t reach for a coping mechanism or use a bathroom break as an excuse to run away.

I stayed.

My hands were allowed to move. It wasn’t weird that I wasn’t making eye contact. No one needed reassurance that I would be okay and I didn’t need to explain away a stim. Knitting gave me cover. Not invisibly either, but in a way people could read as “normal.”

It works just as well at home, whether on a wrong-side-of-the-bed kind of morning or at the end of a beautiful day, knitting is there whether anxiety is or not.

Knitting isn’t a reaction to anxiety.

It’s a place I can rest no matter what my mental state is—or my physical state for that matter.

Is knitting a place like this for you too?

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You don’t have to explain, but “me too” stories are welcome here.

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The first few hours of the day are the priority, after all, made for morning pages and planning, deep work and eating frogs. Frivolous hobbies could wait until the real work was done.

At least, that’s what I’d thought.

Then burnout took over my mornings and made it all but impossible to open my eyes. I dreaded the day. Dreaded all the unfinished tasks.

Works-in-progress triggered panic attacks.

Not knitting WIPs; I didn’t have any of those at the time. No time for any hobbies then.

No, knitting WIPs came later, as the breakdown bled into breakthrough.

Burnout arrives quietly

Priorities used to rule my mornings. Get a quick win early and the rest of the day can ride that high. That strategy worked... until it didn’t.

Wins don’t come quickly when simply getting out of bed is a struggle.

None of the productivity practices could meet me there. They all required energy I didn’t have first thing in the morning. They assumed a nervous system that was intact by default, not one that constantly needed jump starts.

It seemed counterintuitive to take up a slow craft, the kind of thing that was so far on the other extreme of “quick wins.”

Knitting takes days, weeks, even months to get to the dopamine hit of completion.

And yet, it saved me.

No system, no data-cruncher, could measure the peace that came from slowly stitching. There was no way to log it. Somehow this unfinished object greeting me each morning steadied me in ways that checking boxes couldn’t.

What couldn’t be measured still mattered

The kind of fix that comes from finishing a task hits fast and sharp. Like a firework, it’s over in a moment and we’re on to chasing the next one.

Explosive energy like that does feel like momentum—until it runs out. It’s fragile energy. It wears off quickly and demands replacement. That kind of constant pushing isn’t really momentum, it’s an uphill battle.

Knitting offers something less dramatic. Boring by comparison.

Even finishing isn’t fast when you’re knitting, weaving in ends and waiting hour after quiet hour for blocking to dry.

And yet here I am, excited—actually excited—to pick up my needles.

Completion, it turns out, wasn’t the thing I was responding to at all.

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Fireworks or dividends?

If there was no way to log what knitting was giving me, it wasn’t because the return wasn’t real.

It was because I didn’t have the right language for it yet.

We’re taught to think of reward as something that happens in a moment. You do the thing, you get the hit. Finish the task, feel the relief. See the number go up, feel the rush. These spikes fade as quickly as they come, leaving you to chase the next high.

Volatile. The kind of return that keeps you bracing for the dip as much as living for the spikes.

Kind of like the stock market or overtime checks.

But dividends work differently.

Millionaires who want to stay millionaires set up the kinds of investments that pay dividends, and use those to pay their living expenses. It stays steady, and frees them to make their work play and have fun with the ups and downs of financial rollercoasters.

Dopamine dividends work the same way.

The kind of return I get from knitting stitch after slow stitch is a dopamine dividend that gives me the energy for “living expenses” like rolling out of bed.

Knitting made it finally click.

It made this kind of return hard to miss because slow knitting refuses to let me chase highs, and pays dopamine dividends anyway.

The value in absence of adrenaline

With knitting, the work stays unfinished for long stretches of time and nothing bad happens. Progress is visible, but it doesn’t demand urgency or happen in a moment. Completion exists, but it comes so slowly that looking to it for adrenaline doesn’t work.

There’s no shortcut past the steady repetition and no reward for rushing.

I simply sit, snuggled in blankets morning after morning with two sticks and some wool, stitching slow.

That environment trained me, quietly, to tolerate incompletion.

Going to sleep with an unfinished object on my mind stopped meaning pressure, decisions waiting to be made, and demands for resolution. Knitting WIPs don’t ask to be managed. They wait without escalating and don’t break down when left unattended.

And without that pressure, the work progresses. Completion arrives unrushed.

The absence of adrenaline isn’t failure, it’s the point.

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Once knitting taught me to recognize this kind of return, the pattern started to become obvious elsewhere. I stopped asking whether something was productive and started paying attention to whether it paid me back.

Slow mornings don’t count

By the measures I used to trust, my mornings are still as empty and meaningless as they would be if I slept until noon.

Yet these “empty” mornings fill me.

They don’t fix anything all at once. There’s no moment I can point to and say, “this is where things got better,” because coming back from burnout doesn’t happen all at once.

It happens steadily, day by day, morning after slow morning.

Like knitting slowly does.

My two-year-old interrupted my counting, climbing into the big bed full of pillows I’d made into a refuge.

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Knit, purl, knit, purl, yarn-over.

Knit, purl, knit, purl--

Little hands grabbed at mine, and I let her hold on, even as it slowed my stitching.

A year ago, I couldn’t have told you where my knitting needles even were. Hobbies were the last thing on my mind — all my brainpower and emotional energy went toward startup hustle and client satisfaction.

I was burnt out.

Still am.

Smooshed into a pile of pillows with some wool and a couple of sticks.

Me? Knit?

Knitting used to be a treat, a reward. It was the kind of thing I made myself earn after a productive day. So I lost it as I let my standards for productivity fly too high day after day.

It came back to me only when I couldn’t get out of bed to be productive.

The kind of burnout I’d been living with wasn’t dramatic, at least not outside of the privacy of my home. The breakdown didn’t come out in a big announcement. It was quiet.

Actually, it was a quieting.

Finally letting myself hide away. Alternating between absolute silence and blasting music to rebel against the panic pressing me to be productive. Notifications turned off.

When I finally shut out everything that was pulling at me from the outside... when I couldn’t bring myself to do anything else...

I knit.

Even here, I can’t escape.

Knitting is often described as calming, but inviting it back into my life made me realize that the culture around it doesn’t always feel that way.

“How I knit twice as much in 2025 as last year”

“Continental vs English, which is faster?”

Casting on more. Posting progress. Proving you’re improving.

Figuring out cost-per-wear and making other calculations that defend why this knit or that was worth your time (or wasn’t).

Add to this that I’m a designer at heart and I’m reminded exactly why I let the craft slip out of my day-to-day. Designer pressure is even more constant. If you’re so good at this, shouldn’t you maximize that and make some money?

I know I’m not the first to say it: Even the things we love aren’t allowed to simply exist anymore. They’re expected to earn their keep.

And yet.

The easy answer is to choose not to ask that of knitting.

But I’m an entrepreneur.

I can’t help but see things in systems and make tweaks to optimize for scale. I know the power of consistency and the discipline of pivoting when something’s not working.

Hustle culture makes us think that we have to throw all that out if we choose slow.

But what if that’s not true?

Slow fashion is trending. Why not slow monetization, slow living?

This is the question I contemplate as I knit slowly, repeating the same yarn-over, slip-slip-knit motions, slowing them down even further when little hands want a piece of the peace I’m finding.

It’s time to let things take as long as they take and do something well without asking it to be a pristine performance.

Not everything needs to be strip-mined to be worthwhile.

As it is...

My knitting is a practice.

Not a list of projects, and certainly not a pipeline. It’s no longer about measuring output.

Knitting. A practice to return to, one stitch at a time, over and over, sometimes making mistakes and sometimes ripping things back. Always learning what it feels like to stay.

The finished object matters, but not more than the steadiness built as it was made. And not more than the confidence regrowing from showing up, even slowly.

There is value here whether anyone else ever sees what I’ve made.

So here we are.

This publication is an extension of that practice.

You can expect reflective essays rooted in slow knitting as well as slow monetization, a journal of my journey to letting my craft be profitable without letting profitability take over.

These pieces are meant to be read slowly (or listened to as you knit). Observations about burnout recovery, attention, and care, and how knitting supports all three.

You won’t find hustle rhetoric here or pressure to monetize. This isn’t a content treadmill disguised as inspiration. There is no expectation that you keep up, and the pace will be slow enough that you can do so if you choose.

Just like our WIPs, this is a place to return to, not a pace to maintain.

A place where knitting remains meaningful, mindful and grounding.

You’re welcome here.

My fingers can only move so fast.

The yarn splits and twists when I rush through a stitch. Repeats cannot be automated the way workflows take over tasks in tech. Every stitch insists on a certain amount of dedicated attention.

Hand knitting does not scale.

At multiple points in the couple of decades since I first learned to cast on that fact pushed me to drop my stitching to make room for more profitable productivities.

I’ve spent years training myself to bend to KPIs. In that world, unscalable is a flaw. A red flag. The reason behind scrapping an entire process and redesigning it from the ground up.

I lived in a constant state of burnout.

There wasn’t some public breakdown. No announcement, just a quiet personal decision to shut down.

With a nervous system that flinched at the thought of optimizing another thing, my tolerance for noise went way down.

And after a time of hiding in simple silence, covered in comforters behind closed doors… knitting found me.

Not as a way to be productive or put something out.

As a stabilizer.

My body became the bottleneck

You know what’s really unscalable? Something that doesn’t have a stable foundation.

And I didn’t.

Maybe admitting I was about to break down started on the plane home from that business conference as I tried to measure my breathing enough to hold off a panic attack. Or when I realized how much my hands shake when typing reports.

Absolute overwhelm: When the body, not the business skill, is the bottleneck.

When multiplying capacity cannot be the goal, because you can’t grow by trying to multiply by zero.

It was only after I let go of white-knuckling productivity and profitability that my empty hands could pick up the needles again. From there, the steady counting of manual repeats measured my breathing and stopped my hands from shaking.

I was still breaking down, but I wasn’t in a tailspin. Knitting gave me grounding.

Why knitting works

Knitting creates an atmosphere with natural, built-in limitations that cannot be bypassed. My human hands limit throughput. Repetition can only be sped up so much.

These constraints are not negotiable, and that’s precisely why they saved me.

Knitting is nervous system regulation disguised as craft.

Each stitch must pass through my fingers, receiving attention, then move along to make room for the next. There is no bottleneck or stressful pileup, no backlog. Just the quiet assurance that the pace will always fit what my body is capable of and my mind is happy to flow with in any given moment.

This is what “doing the unscalable” looks like when it’s no longer advice for startups pulling on their bootstraps, but the antidote for people who have been over-optimized.

Slowness is not incompetence

I want to be clear about something: choosing the unscalable isn’t a rejection of skill, ambition, or intelligence. Quite the contrary.

Especially in this day and age of AI doing more and always faster, skill and ambition and intelligence are only rising to the top in people who take the time to... be human.

There are times when scale makes sense. A time for efficiency and a time for speed. I’ve done my time there, and I’ll be there again I’m sure.

But there are also seasons when being still is even more important than going faster.

In those seasons, insisting on scalability strips limited resources away and starts undermining the mission. It doesn’t just erode time and money, but attention and energy itself.

Knitting gives me a place where nothing in me is being strip-mined.

The return I receive is immediate and quiet. Not measurable in metrics and data, this value shows up in my body first before it can even become a conscious thought. It’s the complete opposite of delayed gratification. A different kind of return on investment entirely.

Like dividends, paid out steadily, ever present and reliable. Quiet satisfaction that doesn’t need to be justified. Dopamine dividends.

I’ll explore that idea more soon.

Finding my place between hustle and withdrawal

Choosing to do the unscalable doesn’t just mean carving out more time to knit. It doesn’t mean pivoting from one suffocating extreme to another either, from efficiency to anti-productivity.

That’s why knitting is my practice of choice.

It’s a perfect example of slow productivity, the kind of discipline that the tortoise used to outrun the hare and that I will use to climb out of the darkness of absolute burnout.

So the question isn’t so much “why choose slowness” anymore. The real question is what slowness requires.

The cost of choosing slow

If knitting is the perfect way to practice the discipline of “slow” because its limits are enforced, then anything else I bring into this season of recovery must inherit those limits as well.

That’s where the philosophical turns into a structure.

But a soft structure—like linen stitch.

Unscalable, purposeful slowness, taken seriously, must define how I approach this Substack publication.

Taking it slow is the real way to establish a relationship that will last, and that’s what I want:

A relationship with my knitting community.

I do believe in the power of monetization. Providing a way for people to give back and pour into the community is a proven way to build a strong one.

So yes, I’ll monetize this publication at some point.

But I won’t decide when.

You will.

When a true Knit Happens Community has come together, we will take the next steps—together.

Yes, one of those steps will be opening up a paid subscriber tier here, but the steps will also include pattern releases, patterns that don’t optimize for “quick and easy,” but instead focus on grounding practices. Mindless knits that let you decompress, and mindful knits that sharpen your focus.

Any shift, release, or update will come because the community makes room for it.

Starting slowly. Together.

We can start to build this community by getting to know each other. Write a comment, introduce yourself and tell us what your publication is about if you’re also a writer here on Substack. I want to find you and your work, and I’m sure the other readers who find their way to my corner of this platform will too!

In fact, don’t just introduce yourself. Tell me who else I need to meet here. Link your favorite writers and publications when you leave your comment below.

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