Misery Loves Company Six Feet Apart: Part 2 - I Only Buy 300 Piece Puzzles

My Dining Table 2021

This post was originally published August 20, 2021.

I ran an accidental science experiment during lockdown. My high school physics teacher taught me that an object in motion stays in motion and an object at rest stays at rest, unless acted on by an outside force. Running off the high of 2019, the momentum I carried into 2020 was tremendous. Unfortunately, so was the reality of a global pandemic. My internal brakes were screeching to a halt, and suddenly I wasn’t moving anymore.

Dear Isaac Newton, where does all that momentum go?

I still have a very messy draft of a blog post I was going to put out in January 2020. I was moving at the time, and life became too chaotic for me to feel like I could finish it, so it never saw the light of day. This blog series you’re reading right now was originally just one post I’ve been trying to write for the past six months. It took five just to get my pen on the paper. I think I kept waiting for some great lesson on optimism, but instead, I got a hard lesson on grief.

How do you function in a world that feels like it’s falling apart?

Most days, I barely did, focusing on the selfcare nobody talks about. Just getting out of bed, taking a shower, and putting food into my stomach. Finding a way to keep my body functioning even if I felt I couldn’t do the same for my mind.

The first week of July 2020, things changed for the worse. I’ve always experienced chronic pain. It was something I was trying to figure out for a while. I had been seeing doctors, a chiropractor, changing my diet and exercise habits. I was just starting to feel like it was making a difference, and I was walking in a nearby park, desperate to feel the sun and breathe some fresh air, when suddenly my hip started hurting. It felt like something hard and heavy just slammed into me. The same kind of shock as stubbing a toe, but the pain didn’t ebb, it just stayed at its height. When I looked at my hip, I thought I should see a giant bruise, but of course, nothing was there. Nothing had actually happened to it.

I moved up my chiropractic appointment, increased treatment and painkillers, but it only got worse. I couldn’t walk anymore. I couldn’t sit. I spent a lot of my summer laying down with ice packs and heating pads, watching the neighbor’s kids leave and return from the beach, the park, the biking trails.

Damariscotta, ME 2020

I have hobbies. Lots of them. At least I did. Truthfully, I get a lot of frustration from being asked about them right now because the pandemic created a year that made it very difficult to engage with them.

I had big travel plans to revisit Europe and road trip across parts of Canada (all cancelled). I used to like going to the movies (those theaters never get cleaned). And with my increasing pain, even going on long drives, hiking, and taking pictures felt like things of the past.

I didn’t know what to do with myself. Everything became limited. Limited interaction. Limited access. Limited opportunity. COVID was making it really hard to remember that I’m not meant to live in a box.

And as the days went on, the more it stayed the same. When the answer was always no, I started to wonder if the problem really existed with the world or if it was with me. The lines started getting blurred, and I couldn’t figure out if I couldn’t do things or if I didn’t want to.

Through it, I thought up snippets of stories, half-formed ideas that looked more like a love letter to my past interests than something new and exciting. I flipped through rough drafts and felt confused. I couldn’t find the purpose in it. I couldn’t find the feeling. I couldn’t tell if that was the writing, or if that was me.

I was published for the first time last year, then I stopped writing.

My hands were getting antsy, so I started to fill them with puzzle pieces, playing cards, coloring pencils, and dice. I spent hours at the table, moving things, building things, trying desperately to connect with the physical space around me. I sat, and when the pain got too unbearable, I stood. I leaned over the table and moved the pieces around, eventually clicking them into place. I only bought 300 piece puzzles. They were the right size to feel like I accomplished something but wouldn't take too many hours to complete.

It never felt like quite enough though. My hands never stopped itching to move. There was a year's worth of momentum buried down inside of me, and I could never get it all out.

I stopped going to the chiropractor after coming to terms with the fact that the treatments were only making the pain worse. In many ways, it was too late. I lost a lot of my muscle strength, and my hips now have several stretch marks that were never there before and will likely never go away. As I looked in the mirror, I was forced to finally acknowledge that the pandemic had been---and continues to be---deeply affecting me.

Damariscotta, ME 2020

It's amazing what the mind-body connection can do. I started reading about it, or rather, listening to audiobooks about it as I put together my puzzles. The fundamental idea is that physical problems can be rooted in psychological problems. This was not a new concept to me. Stress causing pain, anxiety causing nausea---these were things I was deeply familiar with, but never had I experienced how severe the physical symptoms could get. Some people’s accumulation of stress led to early strokes and cancer. Mine led to debilitating pain.

One book I listened to put it clearly, my body was reacting to the repression of emotions. The more I tried to deny the difficulty of COVID’s impact, the more my body screamed at me that something was wrong. I couldn’t give attention to my anger at some people’s irresponsibility or my anxiety that things would never be normal again, so my body sent signals across my synapses until I had to admit that I wasn’t okay.

Fort Edgecomb, ME 2020

Ignoring the frustration and fear I was feeling, left me unable to access all the emotions buried underneath it. The symptom was that, like all my other hobbies, I abandoned my writing, but the problem was that I lost my love for it. I questioned whether I wanted to write, which seemed like the silliest thing in the world because it has always been an intimate and intricate part of me. This is what I meant, when I said I got a hard lesson on grief. Sometimes deep, persistent pain---physical or emotional---makes me feel like I’ve lost my ability to love. It makes me question if it was ever really there.

Understanding the problem is often the first step to dealing with it. My pain has gotten better over time. Now with my flare ups, which are still more frequent than I’d like, I try to give the physical symptoms less attention than the emotional ones I’ve been trying to push away.

Sometimes, I forced myself to go out on a walk. Small ones. Easy ones. The equivalent of 300 piece puzzles, where it was just enough to feel like I accomplished something. They would still take a very long time. Sometimes, I’d find friends to walk with me. They were so kind to stand still in the snow, while I stopped every 15 minutes to rest and try to stretch the pain out of my legs.

Each walk left me in more pain, forcing me to do everything I was capable of doing while laying down many days later. I kept going out for walks though, once every 4-6 weeks. I needed my life back.

I needed to feel like I could have my life back.

Eventually, I started writing again. It’s a long process. This blog series is not a 300 piece puzzle; it’s a 3000 piece puzzle, and I’m in a lot of pain as I’m writing it. It’s hard to admit that I’m out of practice. My writing is not as good as it was before, and people are going to see that. It’s hard to admit that writing feels more like a responsibility than an indulgence, but buried underneath all the stress is an undeniable sense of longing. A taste of the feeling I had when I went on the archaeological dig. A desperate desire to be reintroduced to something I love.