Puzzle piece of my heart

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

My first puzzle was a large, 10-piece dinosaur print big enough for my first-grade self to sleep on. I took it apart and remade it over and over in my secret fort, loving how the picture could break and come together again and again. I remained enamored with the act of assembling neat, interlocking pieces — probably one of the first indicators of my OCD — until my cat broke into my fort and pooped on it. Such is life.

My love of puzzles dwindled after that, which wasn’t too surprising. I was too busy being an outdoor kid — climbing trees, building forts and catching snakes — to sit at the dining table and obsess over tiny cardboard pieces. I didn’t find my love of puzzles again until high school, when I was struggling to find love or joy in anything I did. I was at my most depressed, barely sleeping due to the workload (which my undiagnosed OCD made significantly worse) and unable to dedicate time to anything fun and meaningless. Everything I did served my academic goals, and that work wouldn’t pay off for four years, leaving me with nothing to show for it in the meantime but the bags under my eyes.

Enter: puzzles.

Puzzles are unnecessary. There’s no time limit, and nothing happens if you don’t complete them. I could spend a few minutes placing tiles and go back to my homework. Most importantly, though, puzzles were something I could control that served as a tangible, visual representation of my work: the perfect combination of instant and delayed gratification, with each piece building toward the finished product. As my depression grew, my puzzle collection grew to counter it.

My college years were a great time to love puzzles because, after four miserable years working to get into a great school on a scholarship, my university shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I, like most people during the shutdown, began questioning everything: “Why had I worked so hard to get into a good school, only to attend on Zoom?”; “Would I ever make the lifelong college friends I was promised?”; “If I go to the grocery store and buy milk someone coughed on, will I inadvertently kill my parents?” 

It was another few miserable years of homework and Clorox wipes, but through it all, there were puzzles.

Jigsaw puzzles in particular saw a massive surge in popularity during the pandemic, just as they had during the Great Depression and the U.S. economic downturn shortly before World War I. Easy to manufacture, long-lasting, cheap and perfect for days spent inside, puzzles have supported humanity nearly since their inception. Cartographer John Spilsbury is credited with the invention of the first jigsaw puzzle — which he called a “dissection” — around 1760, when he cut out the nations on a world map to create a geographical learning aid. They took on the name “jigsaw” once they became popular leisure activities, though they were also made with fretsaws and scroll saws.

All this is to say that whenever the world suffers plague, economic crises, world wars or regular bad days, puzzles are there to help people decompress and distract. I still return to them when the news gets to be too much. It’s comforting to devote myself to a singular purpose when the outcome is assured — as so few things in life are.

We can dedicate ourselves to our goals, forgo sleep for academic achievement, work grueling jobs for financial security, save every penny for a down payment on a home and still, most of us will never achieve our goals. That isn’t our failure — we live in a world where everyday, hard workers are set up to struggle for necessities while billionaires buy their fifth yacht. It’s society’s failure, but we still have to live with it. That isn’t an encouraging thought, and it doesn’t mean that when we’re worrying about the workweek and battling a cold, the recognition of our collective inability to reach our perceived potential will be a comfort. But, with a diagnosis comes treatment: an inconsequential task with clear expectations and a guaranteed, beautiful outcome — in other words, a puzzle — might just break the negative spiral. It certainly does for me.