I started my year standing by the shore, with my weight shifting beneath me as the water dug deep between my soles while my toes curled onto the sand. Like the shifting sand beneath my feet, everything in my life felt unstable, uncertain.
It was a slow work of making sense.
While in the mess, the storm, the chaos (or whatever you want to call it), I find it disorienting and challenging to remember the meaning and purpose I have been telling myself to move forward. Throughout the first half of the year, there were days that turned to weeks and months that I kept asking myself, “Will I ever get out of this limbo?“
I’ve assessed and reassessed the resources at my disposal, the possibilities I could explore, and yet I found them disconnected, like puzzle pieces that should fit together somewhere, but I still don’t know where.
To relieve the swirling mental trouble that had been raging inside me since last year, I reached out to a small puzzle back in January, desperate for something concrete I could actually solve which helped bring my thoughts into something I could tangibly work with—from mental to physical.
Pouring out the pieces from its small container, the pieces fell into a clump of disarray, which reflected the entropy within me.
As I began to work my way around the pieces, flipping some over to their right side, muscle memory kicked in, and I recalled how I used to work on puzzles as a child to entertain myself. Without media on demand, puzzles were part of my mental stimulants, solving one after another, again and again, until my interest wanes. Solving a puzzle now in my 30s made me smile, remembering how what used to be a child’s play is something that I want to learn a lesson from.
And a lesson did I learn.
It may feel counter to our productivity-obsessed culture, but the slow process of making sense is part of getting to where you are supposed to be. It can be disorienting and painful but it’s something one has to endure. Making sense of things that seem nonsensical at the moment is like learning a new thing. Feeling confused while you are still figuring things out doesn’t always mean you are doing things wrong—it’s also a proof that you are growing.
After a rigorous and intentional assessment and reassessment of where I should go next in life (likely part of transitioning deeper into my 30s), it took me six months to finally make sense of where the pieces of my life should fit. It took me a painful and tear-filled half a year to finally see and understand the whole picture of where I am supposed to be.
I can’t remember how many hours I spent solving this puzzle the first time and how dependent I was on the image reference. But doing it again and again, I developed a familiarity with which piece should go where; I even developed a strategy on how to complete it quickly than I did last.
Just this month, I tried working on the puzzle again. And my hands remembered another lesson I learned as a child: Starting with the edges makes it easier to figure out where the rest of the pieces should go.
And I was like, yes! You were right, little Jessa. Thank you for making me remember that setting boundaries creates focus and defines priorities. My twenties may have felt like a great time to explore the things I want to pursue, but I couldn’t afford to go another decade trying to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.
Now, like that puzzle, I understood where to start: with the edges, the boundaries that will hold everything else in place.
jessa 