Pieces

March 8, 2025

It seem to be my best friend, this puzzle before me.  Like the one before it who was my best friend and the one before that. 

 I complete a puzzle a day.  500 pieces of course.  I’m not ridiculous.

 Somehow, a number of years ago, while I was having what the kids those days would have called a “nervous breakdown” I decided to do a puzzle on the dining room table.  I was married then and had a small child so I was busy.  But after my son was in bed and my spouse turned on whatever tv show he liked, I sat before a puzzle and began the work of picking the edge pieces from the box and beginning to piece myself together.

 I had become broken.  I was working at the time as a Hospice social worker, a job I loved.  But I was the on-call person, the crisis averter, the nighttime driver all around the I-25 corridor in Colorado, and I was awakened by pager during the night while needed.  It was exhausting and, unbeknownst to me, it was destroying my mental health.

 I knew that the pattern would have to end soon, or I would collapse under the weight of it. So I asked to be moved to days and was given the go-ahead.  It was at the Christmas party for the company that I walked up to my supervisor to thank her.  It was at the Christmas party for the company that she told me I was to remain on-call.  I was stunned, exhausted, vulnerable and broken.  And I left.  I heard a crack and something broke off within me.

 I came crashing down and ended up in an outpatient program on a mental health hospital floor.  I would come and go for six weeks and I tried to pick up the brokenness and shove it back into place.

 But the space had grown too tight and there wasn’t room for me anymore.

 So I turned to puzzles.

 I love a puzzle because it gives you an opportunity to meditate on the things that build, that fit, that belong.  It helps you see that a life can be put back together even when the pieces fall apart.  And it unveils an image that was covered.  It creates something new where there had been nothing but pieces.

Like my pieces.  Like, it seemed, the pieces of the world.

 Piece by piece I rebuilt my heart.  Piece by piece I rebuilt myself.

 It has been 20 years or so now since those moments of uncovering and I recently returned to puzzling.  Not for the same reason, exactly.  My depression has long since gone and I’ve moved on from those trying jobs and relationships. 

 But I’ve been building myself again, needing structure in internal and external, piece by piece for a couple of years and here is what I’ve learned.

 I only like puzzles with clear color denotations.  It makes it easier to build.  Just like I like patterns in my life:  colors that blend, friends that sing, routine that brings comfort.  These are my pieces and these are the colors that help build the whole.

 I can do a 500 piece puzzle fast.  And once it is done, I don’t even give it a second look, I sweep the re-separated and broken up pieces back into the box and grab the next one. Just like I make fast decisions.  Just like I am willing to make huge life changes while staying agile and decisive.  When I see the image, the whole, I call it good and move on to the next broken piece of me.  This means I have work to do.  This means I believe that the ending is really just the beginning of what is next.

 I have a feeling that puzzling will be a companion throughout my life – especially in times that are so fluid and confusing that I will need some structure to help makes sense of them. Especially in times that are so broken that the pieces of my life lay around me like a shattered image of who and what I thought I was meant to be.  Especially in times that are so lonely, when I am so alone, that a celebration of color, building and finishing anything will reinforce my beloved-ness.

 Maybe that’s it.  Maybe, when I’m home and alone and thinking about life, a puzzle says to me:  You are alive, and you will rebuild.

 Piece by piece, my dear.

 Piece by piece.