I’ve loved jigsaw puzzles for years, and I used to constantly have one in progress. It was a helpful way for me to relax and shed stress.
I even dated someone who also loved puzzles, and working on them together formed a significant part of our courtship. As that relationship fell apart, I stopped doing them because they had become associated with sad memories and feelings of failure around the relationship.
I still kept a stash of them in a hall closet, but I just couldn’t bring myself to actually get one out and put it together.
I woke up this past weekend with a bad cold. A COVID test came back negative, so it really is just a bad head cold, but I’ve been miserable and completely down for the count. I can’t stop blowing my nose long enough to get much done, and my eyes aren’t coping well with screen time.
I finally broke down and got out a puzzle in the hopes that it’s been long enough for the sad memories not to be a barrier anymore.
Despite being sick, I haven’t had so much fun in ages. I’d forgotten just how much the stresses of the day slide away when I get sucked into the world of a jigsaw puzzle.
It felt like reclaiming a piece of myself that I had shoved aside and suppressed. What an amazing feeling of coming home!
Reclaiming my love of jigsaw puzzles is a small thing, but it reminded me of how often we do this to ourselves in wake of loss, trauma, or heartache. We take pieces of ourselves—whether it’s part of our personalities, our hobbies, places we love to go, or things we love to do—and suppress them because of their connection to whatever heartache we experienced.
Can you relate?
Of course, there are times when pieces of us (usually old beliefs or ways of coping) fall away and cease to be healthy or helpful anymore, and we do have to let those go. I’m talking about something different here. I’m talking about things we love that haven’t changed for us except that they’ve been weighed down by difficult memories or someone’s critical judgment (maybe even our own).
Often these small choices to suppress pieces of ourselves happen in a near unconscious manner, and we don’t even realize what we’re giving up. Other times, it may be more conscious, but they still seem like small things in the light of whatever heartache we’re facing at the time.
The problem is that, over time, these seemingly small shunned pieces of ourselves dim our light and our enjoyment of life. We slowly become less of who we are as we give us what we love.
Perhaps part of any healing process needs to be intentionally seeking out those shunned, suppressed, and neglected pieces of ourselves and what we love after a loss or trauma and making sure they get incorporated back into our wholeness as we heal.
As I’ve been slowly working on my jigsaw puzzle, I’ve found myself doing a deep dive into my own life looking for other parts of myself I’ve allowed to be buried and suppressed over the years to see what else I might need to reclaim.
What things do you no longer do, what places do you no longer go, what hobbies do you ignore, or what parts of your personality do you try to suppress to avoid criticism, difficult memories, or painful associations?
What might it look like for you to reclaim one or more of those pieces of what you love or who you are?
Image created with a stock photo from a Canva subscription package.
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