Am I Going Mad
An online community to make sense of the world
around you, through chat and craft.
Who this is for
For analytical minds used to evaluating everything through logic and wondering why you get stuck. Circling around, not able to draw a concrete conclusion. Life seems like a soap opera playing out around you, full of drama and polarisation. Both on the world stage and closer to home. You'd like to jump in and resolve it but know you can't. The itch to do so remains. You feel a little impotent, surely there is something you can do...
What if the answer isn't to solve the issues of the chaotic world around you but to witness it. To witness without needing to fix. To find your own balance and use your energy wisely. To move from a need to understand, to knowing.
What happens inside
Chat. Live, honest conversation with people who think the way you do. Ask the question you wouldn't post with your name attached. What's happening to me. Am I the only one seeing this. Is this normal?
Craft. Bring your own project and work it while we talk. Hands occupied, mind loosened. If you'd rather start something new, you can pick up one of my Boro kits and stitch alongside the group.
Community. Not a comment section. Not an echo chamber either. A place where analytical minds compare notes on the parts of life that don't resolve neatly, and stop feeling like the strange one in the room.
Why craft
Analytical minds don't switch off do they? Even in stillness, your brain keeps running the loop, trying to solve, trying to conclude.
Craft interrupts that loop without fighting it. Your hands take the task. Your mind gets to loosen its grip, not by force, but because it finally has somewhere else to put its attention.
Bring your own preferred craft if you like. My preference is to sew.
There's a reason it's stitching, not scrolling. Boro is Japanese mending, patching old cloth rather than discarding it. Kintsugi is the same principle in ceramic, repairing a break with gold instead of hiding it. Neither tradition asks you to make something perfect. Both ask you to work with what's already broken or worn, and make it worth keeping.
That's the practice, in your hands as well as your head. The questions, the craft. Movement in mind and hands creates the resolution you have been craving.
Why me
I've been a square peg in a round hole my whole life. Logical enough to hold my own in the corporate world, financial services for over 20 years, but never able to put money first when it mattered most. So I left.
Leaving meant learning to trust something other than spreadsheets. Instinct. Intuition. The parts of knowing that don't come with a source you can cite. Now I teach other logical people to do the same, so you can feel in control without needing to know everything first.
Craft was never the point. It was the way through. A mind full of ideas and questions needed somewhere to put its energy that wasn't more analysis. Stitching gave it that. What I made was a happy accident. What kept me sane was the making itself, mind and hands meeting through something closer to the heart.
I'm not teaching you to think less. I'm teaching you what I had to learn myself: how to let your hands hold what your head can't resolve.
Join Am I Going Mad
You've been circling this alone. Time to bring your hands and your questions to people doing the same.
Membership — £15/month or £150/year
Two live calls a month, replays kept and emailed, a private chat channel, anonymous questions any time. Entirely private, held away from the noise and exposure of social media.
Optional Boro kit — £22 + postage Everything you need to start stitching. Buy one, and you're invited to come try a session with us.
[Join the community] [Get a Boro kit]
