I loosened my stitches. It does help to knit a little farther down the needles, and it REALLY helps to be aware of the tension in the hand you use to hold the yarn. You don’t usually need to put much tension on the yarn.

One way to experiment with looser tension is to deliberately knit stitches you think are too loose. Knit yourself a potholder-sized square in this way, take a look at it, and then you just unravel and try something else. You would want to use a fairly smooth and sturdy yarn for this, not something that’s going to split easily or be hard to unravel.

If you’re comfortable with the way you’re knitting, and it’s easy for you, but you’re just not getting the gauge that the book or pattern says you should be getting, because you have too many stitches per inch, then there’s nothing wrong with the way you knit! In that case you just need to try it with slightly bigger needles.

One other thing: some cast-on methods tend to result in tight stitches that are hard to knit into. If you’re just having trouble in the first row, you might try a couple of tricks. One is to just cast on looser, taking care to leave some slack in the stitches. Another is to put two needles together, like a pair of chopsticks at rest, then you cast on to them both together, and then pull one needle out of all the stitches before knitting. Another trick is to put a strand or two of waste yarn that you don’t need for a project along the needle onto which you cast on, then cast on the stitches, then gently pull out the waste yarn before knitting into the cast-on stitches.

Good luck finding the tension that’s right for you! And congratulations for learning to cast on. I still have a hard time with that sometimes.