Day 59: Puzzles

Zodiac symbols puzzle borrowed from the library just this week.

Today I am grateful for puzzles. 

The first puzzle I can actively remember doing was one of sneakers; lots and lots of sneakers in an artistic pile. When I got too good at solving it, I would flip it over and try it without the colors (turns out puzzles are less fun for me that way).

At some point in late elementary or early middle school, I had a 5000 piece monster that I kept on a posterboard under the bed. It was a tableau of teddy bears in front of a house with purple flowers and a LOT of blue sky. It took me so long to solve it that pieces were lost to the vacuum cleaner along the way and I never actually saw it completed.

This puzzle was a BEAST.

Since then, I have done 3D puzzles, logic puzzles, a demon of a puzzle that took me the better part of three months because there were at least a dozen different styles of super small pieces, and digital puzzles. I love solving them all. My brain craves the spatial reasoning.

My puzzle-solving skills have come in pretty handy in the last dozen years. I have worked through logistics for managing three jobs at once so that we could save up to buy a house. When we had to pack up our things, I could Tetris boxes with the best of them. Teaching has meant not just solving puzzles, but building puzzles for others to solve.

I stopped trusting my ability to solve puzzles during the hardest 18 months of my life. I was working the problems every.single.day for teaching, coaching, parenting, moving, adopting from foster care, raising two dogs (one a new puppy), having a grandparent in hospice, being harassed at work, helping my future-daughter stay safe, and trying to stay physically healthy. I was gaslighted through all of that to believe we were a two-income household. That we were a couple who wanted to have kids. That I could trust my husband. 

Everytime I solved a part of the puzzle that led me toward discovering the truth behind the financial, emotional, and interpersonal stressors underlying the massive pile of daily stressors, I was made to feel guilty for finding it. Convinced that I was imagining things. Passive-aggressively manipulated into "peace treaties" that only I ever had to sacrifice for. 

During that time, I went to the hospital thinking I was having a heart-attack (it was a panic attack of epic proportions) and literally gave myself shingles as the stress of trying to solve unsolvable puzzles - with moving and missing pieces - physically manifested itself. I genuinely thought that I was losing my mind because papers would exist one day and be gone the next. A family heirloom I never took out of a box suddenly went missing. An athletic director accused me of breaking a rule that didn't exist - to the point of resigning my position after the most successful year in school volleyball history. Our foster daughter turned out to have a plethora of unique traits and traumas that were never disclosed. It felt like all of these things were my fault. Like I was less-than because I could not figure out how the pieces went together.

Looking back on that time, I can understand it now metaphorically as about ten different puzzles having all the pieces mixed up and yet somehow interlocking. Oh, and I was wearing a blindfold.

Completed this Pixar collage puzzle with my daughter and was super sad to discover one missing piece near the middle.

I survived that period in time because I was already good at solving puzzles. I had been practicing my whole life. Most people do not ever add three living things to their household (puppy and two teenagers), move, resign a job, get harassed at work, be physically incapacitated, and have their spouse commit financial infidelity to the point of a a foreclosure all in the same calendar year. Just one of those things is enough to crush a person. 

I'm partial to landscapes and paintingsas puzzles.

Solving puzzles saved me from being utterly crushed then. It helped me figure out a way to get out of the cycle of abuse at home and later at work. The skills of turning the pieces in different directions, finding new ways to connect, and establishing clear boundary edges have shaped me into the person I am today; which is why I am so grateful for puzzles.

To connect more pieces of the puzzle of me, keep coming back.