U; or, My Struggle With Being Goal-Oriented

I absolutely love puzzles. Hard stop. They have been one of my favorite activities for years and I don’t “Squirrel!” harder than when a puzzle is partially finished and sitting on a table, alone and begging to be made whole. I get a little buzz every time I match each piece to another or the larger picture as a whole and the more complex a puzzle, the harder it is to pull me away from it. I used to work at a company that kept puzzles out in an area with multiple available desks and it was intended to be a place to go, exercise your brain a bit and give you a break from the glare of the monitors. Would you guess that I got “talked to” for coming back from lunch late because I spent 50+ minutes of an hour lunch break completing a 3D puzzle of the White House?

I bring this up because I did something I’ve been waiting so long to do. I restarted the puzzle. 1500 Piece, 2.5′ x 2′ puzzle with a beautiful, complicated image…I couldn’t buy that puzzle fast enough when I saw it on the shelf at the store. I used to buy puzzles back in the late 2000s since I worked the midnight shift at a factory and lived alone; it was hard to spend time with people when lunch time was 1 a.m. and I found puzzles to be a constructive way to break away from the World of Warcraft addiction I was fighting. This is during the deepest part of my writer’s block and, unless it was a college paper, no writing was getting done at this point, not even my beloved Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. I still needed some kind of mental stimulation other than flashy colors on the computer screen and books were a little too sedentary for my (un-diagnosed) anxiety.

So, I started this puzzle; very quickly, I had all the edges completed and had started to isolate color patterns and assemble sections with clear connections. Before long, my kitchen table became a work space for PUZZLES ONLY and I ate at my desk when meals were made. I worked really hard on this particular puzzle for a while; I had the outline of a face completed, the bottom left corner bleeding into the completed bottom right corner, and a little bit of the hair done. Then, life happened. I met my husband, we began dating, I graduated college, moved over and over, had a baby, had a brain tumor, moved again and, finally, bought the home we are in now. All while life continued to happen, my unfinished puzzle sat in storage, on a shelf, on a list of things I had to do once I was stable again or when I would be able to make the time. I always wanted to finish it, Mod Podge it, and hang it on the wall in whatever office I had, a testament to my ability to achieve goals and never give up. It was proof that I could see things through to the end; even if I took longer than other people my age, I could still get things done.

Of course, the puzzle continued to sit in isolation and become one of a long list of things I held as proof against my self-esteem. These were things I longed to hang up as a symbol of this or evidence of that; but, college degrees remained in the envelopes they were delivered in, craft supplies overflowed the totes they are stored in, recipes and instructions were lost, and puzzles still continued to gather dust in the highest part of the darkest closets. A decade passed by before I got to where I am now. Last week, I pulled the puzzle out of the closet, opened the plastic bags that saved the work I already completed (I lived through a time when video games didn’t save your progress; I refuse to go back to the Stone Age again. XD), and put everything back to where it belonged. I even took a break from writing to get the puzzle done to “clear it from the queue”. Even 10 years later, it bothered me that I hadn’t finished assembling a picture cut into 1500 pieces and scattered across a table. I worked on the puzzle during all my “Mommy’s night off” nights instead of doing everything else I needed to get done.

This past Monday night, I could see the finish line; I had only a couple dozen pieces left to put into place and I was finding their homes in rapid fire fashion when an icy jolt ran down my spine: one of the pieces was missing. The box edges had long since separated from the sides and pieces could have fallen from the box at any point in transition from resting place to resting place. My 6 year-old son had slipped into the room in his curiosity at some point without me being there a couple of times (he leaves toys everywhere). My husband and I share the office and he had placed things on the table I was using to work on the puzzle…My mind raced as my hands worked feverishly to find the piece among the others, flipping over the remaining pieces, and running across the already completed pieces in case it was blending in on top of the nearly finished picture. Three pieces remained, and four spots were open. Dread pulled my core into my feet and I could feel the tears brewing; how could I have failed myself and so naively thought that a cheap puzzle would be able to survive 7 moves, 2 children, countless pets, a roommate and my notorious “rearranging” habit?

Creation of and working towards goals is a great way to set expectations, plan for the future, and align your work/life balance; the problem is, sometime goals get in the way of us enjoying the ride. It’s hard to feel accomplished when you are exhausted all the time from “getting everything done” and it’s not always constructive when you complete your list to already have another list to do the next day. You’ll find yourself sitting outside with your children, thinking about everything you still need to do instead of letting time slow down and enjoying them in their play. Instead of talking with your spouse, you are tapping notes away on your phone so they are on their phone as well, both of you so far away even though your bodies are close. Now add the 24-hour news cycle, the downward spiral of catastrophizing and perpetual victimhood of everyone on social media; how do we support all the causes, set our own milestones, achieve all the things, and still find time to just sit down and live?

Two weeks for vacation is not enough. Six weeks for maternity leave are not enough. Hobbies being side hustles are great but they shouldn’t have to be. Living in the United States, this culture of “if you aren’t working on your dreams/goals/advancement/self-betterment 24/7, what are you even doing????!!!?!?!?” is exhausting. Having goals are important, but they aren’t the most important. Life is meant to be lived in. It’s not the road, or trip, or destination. Life is the music you play in the car that starts a sing-a-long, it’s the funny “you had to be there” story from the pit stops you’ve made. Life is the in moments where time stops and you realize you’re living it.

Besides, at what point do your goals turn into just more tasks? In 2008, I had set a goal for myself to graduate college and find a job that pays at least $50,000 a year within 5 years. After graduating in 2011, it wasn’t until nine years later in 2020 that I got there. Guess what? $50,000 wasn’t very satisfying 9 years later. The amount of student loan debt I had accrued coupled with the childcare costs, mortgage payments, paying to get married, credit cards, blah blah blah; that amount of money wasn’t enough anymore. The goal I had set, which I thought very reasonable, was extremely trying to accomplish, all the while I wanted to be doing anything but the jobs I was taking to try and get there. Goals, much like technology, have a way of growing outdated if enough time passes; modifying the bar won’t always solve the problem. I’ve had to learn, as a part of my growth through adulthood, that the purpose behind the goal is as, if not more, important than the goal itself. Making $50,000 a year was a stepping stone to what the purpose was: find a job/career that would allow me to support my family.

My writing isn’t immune, either. For me, the long-term goal has been to finish a story in novel form. I’ve made word count milestone goals and, NaNoWriMo aside, I’ve been able to reach most all of them. But the problem I’m running into now is that finishing a novel isn’t the same as telling the story. I find my excitement in writing sucked away by a looming number count that I know doesn’t really matter, since this novel still has multiple edits to survive. There is also the long list of stories and ideas I want to breath life into but I literally have one computer, one keyboard, two hands, and Siri and I are no longer on speaking terms (my Midwestern accent and proclivity for talking at Mach 3 are a known problem). So the writing queue builds, and the joy I feel pools at my feet; it’s like being the Stork at dinner with the Fox and the shallow bowl I’m served isn’t cutting it. The worst of it all is: I’m doing this to myself.

There is a silver lining here. I’m self-aware; I know I’m doing it when I’m doing it. I’ve also met most of the goals I made to myself in my twenties and I’m learning to take it easy on myself during this re-calibration period. I have young children and they are my priority right now. It’s not stopping me from writing; I’ve been working on skipping around within the novel and working on a little bit of the other stories here and there to curb the guilty feelings. I’ve also gotten significantly better about writing my ideas down for later and committing to only those ideas I have down first. It’s helping. Being someone who does well with goals in the distance means I’m task-oriented, but I’m also someone who thrives powerfully when left to my own devices and provided a chance for spontaneity. I cannot imagine being successful when forcing my creativity to only operate between certain hours of the day, and I’m very tired of giving my energy to the benefit and profit of someone else. I want to benefit from my hard work. Because of this, my goals have been modified. I want to finish this story by the end of this year and start the process of editing next year. Word counts be damned; the story is over when it’s over. I’m not worried about whether the book makes money and I’m not trying to hit a monetary gain with it because I’m just trying to take the pressure off for a little while. I want to have a serial story published on this site starting next year, and at least two short stories published here as well. I’m putting it out there in a general sense but with the knowledge that the new goal is to be a better writer for the sake of the stories I want to tell.

Oh! I should probably ease your mind at this point and let you know that I found the missing puzzle piece! After a good 15 minutes of looking, I discovered that the piece had fallen off the table and landed on a nearby drawer caddy. In that moment, I was more delighted that the puzzle, which had survived multiple children, pets, homes, moves, and closet cleanings, had managed to stay together long enough to get finished. Now, I have the arduous task of finding a frame large enough to put it up in the office. No problem; at least this is an easy enough goal to accomplish.

–V. Raylean