Content warning: this piece deals with topics related to mental health and institutionalisation, and there is a mention of suicide.
The sun rises a little earlier every day, and then a little later. I set my alarm clock for the same time regardless, and some days I get out of bed; then there are the other days. There is always something to do, but rarely much point in doing it. In many ways, I am one of the lucky ones: I am not falling apart. I am slowly piecing myself back together. I am sometimes not sure what year it is: twenty years apart, I am having the same experience.
In my teens, in the year 2000, I spent many months hospitalised with an intense, complicated and suffocating depression that oscillated between desperate rage and near-catatonia, leaving me incapable of speech at times, locked inside my own head. In 2020, as Covid-19 hit, the months I spent indoors waiting for the virus to depart were visceral echoes of this much earlier, more personal lockdown. I thought I had left so much behind, but confined to a small series of rooms I found the same emotions surfaced, the same rituals gave me comfort, and the same escape into play began to matter, as I tried to trace a path back to something approaching normal, forced to let go of so much I could not control.
The purpose of my first institutionalisation was to attempt to solve something unsolvable. The first jigsaw I remember attempting was a horrendously bucolic rural landscape scene, which I started in the week between Christmas 1999 and Welcome To The Year 2000 while I was still on an adult psychiatric ward, waiting for my space in the adolescent one that would be my home for the next nine months. I remember falling into the jigsaw neatly and cleanly, with no sense of self left behind; I could sit in the living room where Eastenders was playing on the shared television, and disappear for a while into a neat, intricate lattice of a solvable problem. Classifying things by shape, by colour, by size; the little moment of just-rightness that comes when you spot the place where something lives. After spending days meticulously assembling the blue sky over the village well in that first jigsaw, finding that it lacked three of its 500 pieces was an anticlimax that matched the mood of the turn of the millennium for me: champagne in a plastic cup, and an illicit cigarette after midnight, and no real answer to the question of how to keep living when it seemed so monumentally difficult. Not much stayed with me when I changed hospitals, apart from the sort of debilitating, suicidal depression that sucks the air out of your lungs and the light from the sky, and an almost compulsive desire to keep doing jigsaws. Ideally ones that still had all the pieces.
As I settled onto the adolescent ward, that desire to solve something deepened, as my treatment continued in the background. I set up a table in the shared living room and spent hour after hour piecing together increasingly complex puzzles, losing myself in the flow of it: take a piece, try to map it against what I could see on the table or on the box, understand it in context, find it a home. I finished all the ones the ward had to offer, and the other kids persuaded their parents to bring in unwanted Christmas gifts from home: landscapes progressing to abstract prints, to photographs of tables full of Brussel sprouts or lakes of baked beans, fiendishly difficult to parse. I got upset when other people tried to help; I was OK with it when they accidentally took pieces apart, but the solution had to be just mine. I was gently trying to put back together something broken, something that didn’t make sense. Jigsaws are almost too blunt a way to explain what my brain was trying to do. I’m sorry. I was fifteen years old, and fond of overfitting my metaphors.
Now I am 36, and the metaphors are still both clumsy and apt. In early lockdown, in March, I found myself trawling the internet for a specific kind of jigsaw: firstly, huge; secondly, intricate; thirdly, robust and well made. I was lucky enough to be locked down in a space with a room I could use as an office, which also had an expanse of floor large enough to take a 5,000 piece jigsaw, almost as wide as I am tall. Too big for my jigsaw mat, so instead I spread a grey blanket on the carpet and, as the world outside became unsolvable, set my mind to making order out of chaos. Intermittently, my cat decided to treat the jigsaw as his playmat, sending sprays of placed pieces into the air and batting them around the room. I didn’t mind. Setbacks are part of the solution.
When it comes to puzzles, I vastly prefer the playful, intricate ones that require you to think about pattern, colour and shape. There is less joy, for me, in vast expanses of identical black or blue, and I demand a certain level of quality and distinctness in the way a pattern is cut. I want an image that can hold my attention, and that demands a close eye for detail—I am good at seeing the intricacies, and spotting where something small provides a critical clue that leads a piece to be placed here instead of there. The curve of a branch, the precise pattern of paintstrokes, or the intersection of three specific leaves of the Brussels sprout; this is an exercise in learning to see the small things, and understand how they fit into something much larger, and not yet fully understood. I learned this on the adolescent ward: anything that requires brute force is unsatisfying, lacking in elegance. The jigsaw should be an experience of mastery, and that requires both a pattern and a piece that lend themselves to a sense of playfulness, not just the rote following of a rule. The aim is not to compute but to deduce.
Everyone has their own way of playing a jigsaw. Some people are methodical, while others work spontaneously, spilling out handfuls of pieces and working from the middle outwards, discarding those that don’t fit the current zone of interest. I view this as an affront to propriety: logic and care are vital ingredients of my play.
The correct way to begin a jigsaw is of course to carefully sort it into two piles, the edges and the middles, and from there to begin, detective-like, to narrow down the possibilities. With a 500-piece puzzle this is not a daunting task. With 5,000 pieces, this is its own particular commitment: a sorting that relies just on shape, on feel, and is achievable without turning on much of the brain at all. It is, in short, an excellent activity for conference calls, if you don’t need to appear on video: you can ping pieces into one pile or the other while also staying cheerfully focussed on the matter at hand.
This is the great blessing of jigsaw play: the ability to do two things at once. Like knitting while watching television or dancing while you do the washing up, working on a jigsaw sections the world into two parts, allowing you to apply your attention with much greater care. Paradoxically, by presenting a distraction, this kind of play permits genuine, deep focus at an almost subconscious level. At times, I’ve participated fully in complex business strategy meetings while sorting a sheaf of tree-leaf pieces into the right order, the two activities perfectly complementary. Unsolvable problems get easier to deal with, below the level of your conscious mind, when you are solving unrelated problems at the same time. No one ever let me take a jigsaw into therapy before the pandemic, but I am certain, when I was younger, that it would have helped. I needed to unfuck something, to render it explicable. As my country came late to lockdown, as—needlessly—so many people died and I could do nothing to prevent it, as grief came to live next door, I made a quiet stand against entropy in my spare bedroom.
Time telescopes, in an institution, in a lockdown, in a pandemic. It expands to fill the available space, reacting only briefly to the pressure placed upon it. There is a sense of trapped helplessness at the same time as progress occurs: it is a lesson in patience. Days go by in which you do nothing. Nothing is remembered, nothing is changed; you cannot mark the passage of time by normal milestones; as the lockdown progresses, every conference call is part of the same, singular ur-call that flattens human nuance and personal connection into a smear of generic interaction. Like looking at the world from inside a soap-bubble; like the glassy unreality of a really deep depression. Details begin to matter far more than the bigger picture: instead of the passage of months, you focus on mealtimes, on moments of transition, on the routine and the way it, very occasionally, breaks down.
My lockdown memories share the same exceptional-moment quality of my hospitalisation ones: the day the cat escaped, the day the fire alarm went off, the day I lay on the floor with my best friend and one of our other friends threw sequins over us. These are the details that provide the context that lets you find the pattern, understand the minute ways in which today is different than yesterday, juggling it in your head so that it becomes distinct and special. All the time knowing there is a bigger picture that you would be able to see, if you could pull your head back and view it all from a distance. There are two options, with both jigsaws and lockdowns: you can see the fine grain of the detail in enough distinction to be able to make progress, or you can see the big picture from a distance, from a perspective that allows you to see the movement but renders it impossible to actually move forward. The perspective of metres, or of years.
About three years ago, more than fifteen years after I was first institutionalised, I discovered—to cut a very long story very short—that I am autistic. It was like lifting a sofa cushion and finding a half-dozen edge pieces and the missing picture for a jigsaw you hadn’t ever finished doing. That diagnosis was neither the beginning nor the end, but a major turning point in a process of piecing together my identity in the face of a world that often makes little sense, moulded as it is around the fact that there is a normal range of human experience which turns out to be moderately far outside my own. That discovery has helped me to finally understand why so many questions were never really resolved when I was a teenager, and where that depression came from, and what it has morphed into, in the intervening years. It has helped me understand how to zoom out, to take the long view, and understand myself in context.
Many autistic people absolutely hate the jigsaw puzzle piece motif which is often used to symbolise the condition, because it implies that our autism is something to be solved, or that we are somehow lacking and in need of completion. I too dislike these implications, but I find value in the idea of diagnosis as a piece of a puzzle I have been working on for years. There is value, too, in the idea that a jigsaw’s ideal state is not necessarily completion, but as a work in progress. It is the journey that matters, not the end. Satisfaction comes at the moment when the final piece is placed, but it is also the easiest moment of the whole project: the challenge is over, the work complete. Then, days or weeks or perhaps only moments later, you will simply scrunch the pieces between your fingers, destroy everything you have done, and render the whole thing back to its natural, entropic state. To me, the moment of delicious destruction is always more meaningful than the act of completion. I am finishing one cycle and beginning the next. There are always more puzzles to be solved.
Maz Hamilton (twitter) is a writer, systems nerd and recovering journalist. They work for Audible, run the tabletop game design studio Rowan, Rook and Decard, and once created the UK’s largest bespoke zombie apocalypse game.
Image based on skittledog’s “puzzling” under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license, and shared under the same license.