How Making Things Became My Way of Coping With Stress

A few months ago, I decided to try stained glass because I wanted a hobby that had absolutely nothing to do with my phone.

I didn’t expect much from it. I thought it would be fun to learn something new, make a few things for my house, and give me something to focus on after work. Instead, I think I accidentally found my art form.

I’ve tried a lot of creative hobbies over the years, but stained glass is different. Besides journaling, it’s the first hobby that feels less like something I want to do and more like something I need to do. When I’m cutting glass, grinding pieces, or soldering everything together, I’m not thinking about work. I’m not scrolling through my phone. I’m not replaying something that happened three days ago. I’m just making something.

And somewhere between all this glass and flux and burnt fingertips, I realized my need to make things didn’t start with stained glass at all.

My grandma has always been creative. When I was a kid we were constantly making something together. She taught me to knit and patiently fixed every stitch I dropped, we played guitar, made mosaics, painted rocks, strung jewelry, bleached leaf designs onto hoodies in the backyard.

She gardened. She journaled. She cooked. She sewed quilts and grocery bags I still use to this day.

Her house always felt like a home, and I think a lot of that came down to the fact that so much of it had been touched by somebody’s hands. Things were grown there. Things were cooked there. Things were made there.

I wasn’t thinking about any of that as a kid, obviously. I was just hanging out with my grandma. But those afternoons taught me something I didn’t understand I was learning: how to make things simply because making them feels good.

This year marks ten years of working in the law enforcement world in one capacity or another, and I’ve been feeling burnt out.

There are a lot of things about the job that accumulate over time. Changing schedules, lack of sleep, overtime, court, difficult calls, stress, and spending a significant portion of your life dealing with other people’s worst days eventually start following you home.

I’ve watched people find all kinds of ways to cope with that. Some are healthier than others.

For me, two of the most important have become journaling and making things.

I’ve kept journals for years, and they have helped me work through complicated thoughts and difficult periods of my life better than almost anything else. There is something about physically putting thoughts onto paper that forces me to slow down long enough to actually understand what I’m thinking.

Making things does something similar, except it gives my brain a break from thinking altogether. Stained glass requires enough attention that I can’t really do anything else while I’m working on it. If I’m scoring a piece of glass, I have to think about where that line is going. If I’m grinding a piece, I’m watching the shape. If I’m soldering, I’m paying attention to what my hands are doing.

For a few hours, the rest of my life gets pushed to the side.

I can spend two hours on my phone and somehow feel like I didn’t rest at all. Two hours on stained glass is the opposite. At the end of it, there’s something sitting on my table that didn’t exist before.

It’s usually imperfect. My solder lines get lumpy. Pieces don’t always fit how I pictured them. Sometimes I pick the wrong glass and don’t realize it until I’m halfway through.

But I made something. That’s a kind of satisfaction I never got from just consuming things: scrolling, watching, buying. Making things forces me to actually participate in my own life instead of watching everyone else live theirs through a screen.

Recently, I made a stained glass frog for my grandma’s birthday. He’s a little wonky. I’ve only been doing stained glass for a few months, so I’m still very much a beginner. Every project teaches me something new, usually because I did something wrong and have to figure out how to fix it.

But while I was making her frog, I started thinking about how strange it is that I was now giving her something I had made. For most of my life, it has been the other way around.

I still have the quilts she made me. I still use the grocery bags she sewed. These things have survived moves, decluttering, changing tastes, and different stages of my life because they aren’t just objects to me. Someone I love spent their time making them.

And now I’m doing the same thing.

I’m making stained glass for people I love, spending hours choosing colors and cutting tiny pieces of glass and worrying about imperfections that the person receiving it will probably never notice. I don’t think I would have become this kind of person without growing up around someone who was always making things.

When adults encourage kids to make things, I don’t think we’re usually imagining what those kids will do with those skills twenty or thirty years later.

My grandma probably wasn’t fixing my dropped knitting stitches because she thought she was teaching me how to cope with adulthood. She was probably just trying to spend time with me. But that’s what happened anyway.

She taught me that when life feels overwhelming, I can pick up a journal. I can make something with my hands. I can put my phone somewhere else for a few hours and give my brain one small thing to concentrate on.

She gave me ways to occupy my mind that didn’t depend on buying something, drinking something, scrolling through something, or escaping from my life.

I don’t know if she realized she was doing that. I’m not sure I realized it either until I sat down to write this.

Stained glass may be the hobby I’m obsessed with at the moment, but the part of it that feels so familiar has been with me since childhood.

I still sit down with something in my hands and try to turn it into something else. I still make mistakes. I still have to figure out how to fix them. The only difference is that now, when I’m finished, I have to find somewhere to put all of this stained glass.

Good thing Grandma has windows.