The Bittersweet Tale of the Jelly Bean Puzzle

If you are my Facebook friend, you have no doubt heard much about the jelly bean puzzle.  It has sort of consumed my life in a way, and it's brought up a lot of emotions that are ... well, quite frankly, difficult.

A couple of weeks ago, Belle started going through this puzzle phase.  Basically, she did every single puzzle we had in the house (virtually all of them fairly simple ... they're all Disney Princess and Fancy Nancy children's puzzles).

It struck a chord with me, to say the least.  See, I used to love doing puzzles.  It was one of my absolute favorite activities.

The problem is, it was an activity that I shared with my stepfather.  I would start doing a puzzle on the dining room table, and he would grouse at me about it, then the next thing I knew, he would be helping me with it.  We would have epic puzzle events, and on more than one occasion we would glue and frame the end result (we took on some tough ones).

Sometimes it would take us days to get through puzzles.  A lot of the time, we worked on the current puzzle together.  Sometimes, he'd get home from work and I'd have made a ton of progress.  Often, I'd get home from school and find that he'd gotten huge sections done.  If we were stymied, we'd work together.

I haven't done a puzzle since my stepdad's death in 2004.

While I love both my mother and my father very much, there were complexities that did not exactly allow us to have the best of relationships.

My mother suffers from hypothyroidism, and before she was diagnosed and began medication ... well, walking on eggshells is the best way I can think of to describe it.  You never knew what would set her off, and she caused deeper scars with words than I can express.  I also tended to get the brunt of it, for reasons that are skeletons in my family closet.

The same can be said of why my (and my siblings') relationship with my father is so complicated.  It is not my intent to air dirty laundry, particularly laundry that dates back to when I was a sixth grader.  Life goes on.

And I am the first to admit that I was not an easy child, an easy teen, or, for a long time, an easy adult.

Which is why my stepdad was so important to me.  He accepted me the way I was, held me accountable for my actions without being cruel and abusive, and did not allow me to take myself too seriously.  He also buffered my often-acrimonious relationship with my mother and allowed us to appreciate and even come to like each other (you can love without liking, and I think my mother and I had that dynamic for quite a long time).

When he passed, I descended into a depression so deep that I wasn't even aware of it.  I had never been able to depend on anyone or anything until my stepdad came into the picture, and losing him left me so lost and adrift that I couldn't even verbalize it.  Trying to support my mom without letting her know how lost I was also presented a challenge.

My mother and stepfather were truly, madly, and deeply in love, and I cannot imagine the pain she suffered, then and now.  My own loss, deep as it was, pales next to what my mother has gone through since the lung cancer death sentence came down.    

Ironically, it was Pythagorus' fall into mental illness and alcoholism that snapped me out of my own multi-year zombie state of loss and pain.  Someone had to be strong for the kids ... after all, hadn't that been what my stepdad had done for me?  He would have been disgusted, utterly appalled, by Pythagorus' actions, would have felt unspeakable disdain for the man who had shaken to the core the lives of his beloved granddaughters, and I didn't want to be in the category of people who would disappoint my stepdad in any way.  

As I pulled myself out of the mess my life had someone become, it was my stepdad's face that I kept in front of me.  It was his strength that got me through, and I came to terms with his death in the process, strange as that sounds.

I've come quite far away from the who puzzle thing ...

When Belle got on her puzzle kick, I decided that I would get a more challenging puzzle that she and I could do together, that it would be a way for us to bond the way that my stepdad and I had.

However, I clearly got a little overzealous with my choice of puzzle--a 1,000 piece monster made entirely of various colors of jelly beans.

Suffice it to say, I'm out of practice vis a vis the wild world of jigsaw puzzles, and Belle quickly found that this was a different kind of thing altogether and lost interest.

Progress has definitely been made ...

There is lots of work left to do, however, and it is a bittersweet experience for me.

Part of me keeps hoping that my stepdad will show up, because this was our absolutely favorite kind of puzzle--quite a challenge, and one that can be worked on a little bit at a time.

I'm just feeling like I'm not up to the task all by myself, and like I said, Belle bailed.

I'm going to keep on trucking, though.  Even if it takes me a month, I am going to get this stupid puzzle finished.  And then I am going to glue it and frame it and keep it for always, because even though it didn't necessarily allow Belle and I to bond in the way I'd hoped, it's given me back a little bit more of my stepdad ... in a healthy and not-depressed way, if that makes sense.

I am deeply happy working on this puzzle even while I'm incredibly sad.  Does that make any sense?

So anyway, that's the story of why the jelly bean puzzle that I've been bemoaning on Facebook is more than just a puzzle ...

Catharsis.

Note: School starts for me on Friday (I know, I can't believe it, either), which is also the day that Addie leaves for college.  I am going to be pretty busy (and strung out) the next week or so, but I have some great guest posts lined up--one from my favorite student of all time, one from my good buddy Martin over at From Sand to Glass, and one from a friend of Henry's who's become my good friend too over Facebook (don't you love technology?).  I hope you'll enjoy all of them (I think they're pretty amazing :-)), and if you're interested in writing a guest post, drop me an e-mail.

Connection Between Creative Genius and Being "Different"?

One of my students once asked me, "Why is it that every author is crazy?"  I thought about avoiding the question, actually, because who wants to go there, really?

First of all, there's that word "crazy" ...  (which, incidentally, is why it took me five minutes to come up with a title for this post ;-))

It's almost impossible to define "crazy", or I suppose we all have our own individual parameters as to what the word means.  Kooky?  Dangerous to yourself and others?  Impossible to understand?  Unique?  Those who beat to the march of their own drummers?  Manipulative?

And yet that long-ago student stumbled upon a kernel of truth that I had always been aware of on some level but had never really contemplated particularly deeply.

There is, in my opinion, an unquestionably correlation between creative genius and ... well, I'll call it eccentricity.  Michelangelo ... Marlon Brando ... Kurt Cobain ... J.K. Rowling ... Charles Dickens ... and so on.

And the so-called "27 Club" seems more evidence to support this theory than mere coincidence.    

I face it head on now as a teacher, usually through the unfortunate Edgar Allan Poe.  Before we read any of his stuff, I give my students notes about his life (I don't give proscribed notes very often, but I do when introducing Poe's biography).

Consider Poe's tragic existence ...

Dad left the family, Mom died when he was just a little kid of tuberculosis, his foster father didn't have much use for him, his foster mother died when he was still fairly young (also of TB), he had a gambling problem, his military career was a disaster, he married his thirteen-year-old cousin when he was in his late twenties (and said cousin died of TB ... gee, wonder if Poe was a carrier or something?), couldn't hold a job because he was by most accounts a hot-tempered and opinion twit, had a severe addiction problem, and died under very bizarre circumstances.  (That's the nutshell version, obviously)


When reading Poe's works (and I personally think he was a writer of prodigious talent), you can see the tragedies that shaped his life all over the place, an autobiographical legacy from a writer that will be remembered for being ... well, crazy.


There are very few writers, artists, actors, musicians, or any sort of master of a creative outlet who appear to have had "normal" lives.  (I know, "normal" is about as difficult to define as "crazy", right?)


Speaking for myself, I know for a fact that I would not be the writer I am were it not for those traumatic events that have shaped my own life.

And while I'm pretty sure I'm mentally sound, I have definitely been impacted by the learning disabilities that have complicated my existence, not to mention insomnia.

If I ever achieve the degree of fame as a writer where a biography would be written about me, it would probably make for an interesting read (not because I'm an interesting person but because I have somehow had so many interesting experiences).

Anyway, that's my take ... interesting life experiences (and, sadly, the more traumatic the ... better?) and/or mental illness foster creative genius, without a doubt.

What do you think?

Musings on the Horrorversary

Anniversaries--weddings, homeownership, even birthdays--are all celebrations of an event, one with theoretically happy connotations.

So what do you call the day that is the antithesis to those joyous times, the ones that come up once every year the same as the happy days? I created a word tonight when I was thinking about this--horroversary. I'm sure someone else has used this before, actually, but I'm not really in high thinking mode, so work with me a bit here.

I have several horrorversaries. One is in December, one is in January, (I suppose I have to add one these days ...) and one is tomorrow. October 23rd (also my grandfather's birthday--an anniversary for my Papa, a horroversary for me ... life is strange) is the worst. It always will be.

Ironically, my birthday is three days later, on the 26th. My mother has planned to have relatives over Sunday night to celebrate, and it's very hard to say, "I just want to be left the fuck alone for the next few days. THAT's what I want for my stupid birthday." She was on my case tonight for "sounding depressed". Oh, shit, if she only knew ... And my students, my sweet and wonderful and loving students, they have been very "sneaky" in their attempts to plan an in-class birthday party. I am trying so hard to keep my shit together on my horroversary, and everyone else is so focused on my birthday (a.k.a. my anniversary, if you want to think of it that way), and I just reread that and I realize what a selfish bitch I sound like and ...

And I guess I'm going to stop now. I'm going to bed on a double dose of Ambien and metaphorically beat myself up for the next few days over something that happened over ten years ago, when I was a completely different person.

How do you spend your horrorversary? (By the way, I truly and deeply hope that I'm the only person who suffers horrorversaries ... when Addie starts saying, "Ten days until my birthday" the first day of September, I know that I think of my horroversary--all of them, but especially this one--on the same terms. Maybe nobody reading this can relate to this in any way, shape, or form ... and if so--I AM SO GLAD FOR YOU :)

My Dark Times

The dark times. I think I've had them all my life, periods of time where things felt hopeless, dark, devastating, and ... all right, I'm using the word, depressing.

The dark times predate things brought about by my own stupidity, but it really bugs me when people blame all their problems on a dysfunctional childhood, so I won't. My mother's imbalanced thyroid and my father's affair with the victim-witness advocate at his office and their subsequent acrimonious divorce did not cause the dark times. There were times I lived in a darkness inside of myself long before my father walked out the door and my mother told me that it was my fault.

Sometimes I think I would be a therapist's greatest dream come true.

The problem is that I don't believe in therapy. I've seen too many people become four or five times more fucked up than they were going in following therapy. I've seen therapy destroy familial relationships. I've observed people who learned through therapy to direct their hate and angry feelings onto people that weren't the only people responsible for said hate and angry feelings. In a nutshell, more often than not, I've seen therapy make problems bigger even as the individual in therapy thinks they become smaller. I'm sure this is not always the case, but I guess I'm one of those people who can only judge on what I've seen, and that's what I've seen.

Is there truly a value for therapy? And how about medication? I've heard about the wonders it allegedly works, but I haven't seen such an idyllic experience in my observations. Sometimes I wish that medication was truly the panacea that so many people think it is. Any thoughts on this? Perhaps I need to change my thinking on this one ...

In my experience, all medication does is change the essence of who or what a person is. It's not that I don't believe in depression or anxiety or whatever. Trust me, I know as well as anybody that they exist. Frightening as this sounds, I found self-medicating through a variety of substances to be more helpful than any of those drug-of-the-month with full page ads in magazines and those ridiculous television spots to be. For example, one of my favorite people in the world became a completely different person after starting Lexapro. He is as addicted to the so-called security offered through that doctor-approved drugging as I ever was to anything. His refusal to admit to the changes brought about by the Lexapro, none of them positive in my opinion, has altered the nature of our relationship, possibly forever.

When push comes to shove, what's the difference, really, between wanting a Marlboro when you're overwhelmed by stress and wanting an Ativan?

I just read through what I wrote, and I almost deleted it. The thing is, though, everyone who knows me well is aware of the dark times. They are also aware that I've tried various ways to make them go away, both medically-sanctioned ways and ways that could probably have me put in jail. I'm reading Stephen King's It at the moment, though, and it made me think about the combination of light and darkness that exists in everyone, the yin and yang, the balance.

I guess I can write this now because I actually like myself now. There are a lot of good things about me, and I can admit that even as I know that there are some things that are not so good. The thing is, the dark times are a part of me. The black cloud that threatens to overwhelm me sometimes is as much a part of who I am as the smile and the laughter that many people think is me.

Can I embrace the things that make me so woefully unhappy when they are ingrained in my soul, pumped through my heart, an integral part of the very air I breathe? Would trying to get rid of those black feelings alter the essence of who I am?