Lessons from Puzzles: Trusting the Shape of Your Life

Sometimes the deepest lessons don’t come from huge life-altering moments. Sometimes they come quietly… while sitting at a table late at night in sweatpants looking for a tiny little piece of sky.

In this deeply personal episode, Lizzi reflects on the unexpected wisdom she’s found through doing puzzles — and how something so simple became a mirror for healing, identity, nervous system regulation, comparison, play, patience, and learning to trust herself again.

Through heartfelt storytelling, reflections on childhood beliefs, adult pressure, and the quiet ways we rule ourselves out before we even begin, this episode explores what puzzles can teach us about forcing what doesn’t fit, slowing down, rediscovering joy, and allowing life to unfold piece by piece.

This conversation is for anyone who has ever questioned their worth because they moved slower, felt different, struggled to “fit,” or believed they weren’t capable enough to try.

Sometimes healing doesn’t arrive dramatically.
 Sometimes it happens quietly… one piece at a time.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. I am so, so happy that you're here. And yeah, thanks for letting me have a voice, right? So I was thinking a lot about puzzles lately, because I've been doing a lot of them. And I love doing puzzles. Most of them, not all of them, because some of them are, you know, just really annoying, and I don't like doing them. But, you know, overall, they're pretty cool. You know, it it probably just seems like such a simple thing to talk about, I guess. And maybe even kind of random, right? But they've really been affecting me more deeply than I expected. I just, I was, every time that I do a puzzle, something pops in my head, you know, of like either a challenge or, you know, something. And so I was like, oh, well, that's what I could make a podcast on, right? So what started as something I picked up just to clear my mind kind of became something else entirely. It started showing me things about myself. And, you know, things about like the way I move through life, the way I see myself, the way I pressure myself, the way I force things sometimes, you know, the way I give up on myself before I even begin. And somehow sitting at a table with scattered pieces of cardboard has become this strange little mirror for being human. So interesting. And I think that's part of why it's, you know, hitting me so much, right? Or like showing up for me so much. Because sometimes the deepest lessons don't really come from these huge life-altering moments, right? Sometimes they come quietly while sitting at the table late at night in sweatpants looking for a tiny little piece of sky. For those of you who have done puzzles, you know what I mean. And something I didn't really know until recently, until I looked it up, is that puzzles didn't originally start as entertainment. Go figure. In the 1700s, a man named John Spilsbury created what's considered the first jigsaw puzzle. So he was a map maker and he mounted maps onto wood and cut them into pieces to help children learn geography. And when I learned that, I just sat there for a second because even now, that's still what puzzles feel like to me. They feel like a way of learning, maybe not in the sense that he intended them to be. Now, just not just really how pieces fit together, but how we fit together, how life fits together. How sometimes things look disconnected and chaotic and meaningless at first until slowly, patiently, something begins to show up, something begins to emerge, right? And honestly, puzzles weren't always something I allowed myself to enjoy. So my sister, she's super smart, and she's always been really good at them. She's always been fast, organized, efficient. She could sit down and somehow immediately start seeing patterns and sections where things belonged. And I remember kind of deciding somewhere along the way that I wasn't like that, that I wasn't fast enough, I wasn't organized enough, I wasn't smart enough. And nobody really told me that directly, I guess. But that's that's the thing that's interesting about it. That sometimes the deepest limitations in our lives are not things that people explicitly put on us. They're like conclusions we quietly arrive to by ourselves. These little identities we build out of comparison. And then we live inside those identities for years without ever questioning them. I do think a lot of us do that. We have one experience where we struggle with something and suddenly it becomes who we are. I'm bad at this, I'm not creative, I'm too emotional, I'm awkward, I'm not disciplined, I'm not capable. And I guess over time those statements just stop feeling like thoughts and they start feeling like facts. And because I decided puzzles belong to people who were faster and better and more naturally good at them, I didn't really let myself enjoy them as an adult. I guess until recently. So my aunt, my lovely aunt, she loves puzzles. And somehow she gently brought them back into my life. And she wasn't even trying. I just saw her love for puzzles and I wanted that too. And I guess now it's become this super sweet thing where my sister, my aunt, and I send each other pictures of puzzles we finished. You know, and it probably sounds small, but it doesn't really feel small to me because I'm letting myself participate in something I once excluded myself from. Maybe not out loud, but you know, very quietly. And even though it takes me a while to finish them, I still feel proud when I do. I still send the picture. And the other day, so I noticed something really interesting. I finished a puzzle and went to send the photo, and then I hesitated just for a tiny second, and I realized there was a still kind of a small part of me wondering if it was good enough to share. And I guess that kind of hit me and I didn't expect it because that voice didn't come from the puzzles. The voice is actually older than the puzzles. And I guess I think a lot of us carry that voice inside too, the quiet internal measuring system that constantly is asking, is this enough? Am I enough? Does this count? Do I count if I'm slower? Do I count if I'm still learning? Do I count if someone else does it better? And for a moment I just sat there with that feeling. And then I sent the picture anyway. I can't fully explain why, but I felt healing, not because of the puzzle, but because maybe healing is sometimes allowing yourself to take up space in places you once convinced yourself you didn't belong. And recently, because of my kids, I started doing more kid-friendly puzzles too, like bright colors, funny images, silly little details, not the beautiful artistic landscapes that took sophisticated, that look sophisticated and impressive. Just, you know, fun puzzles. And I remember having this thought, this isn't really for adults. I probably shouldn't be enjoying this this much. And meanwhile, I was completely enjoying it. I was laughing, getting excited over funny little pieces, feeling genuinely entertained. And honestly, I started feeling like a kid again. Not, you know, like this immature feeling or irresponsible feeling, but just open. And I felt alive in a softer way, right? And I realized how sad it is that so many of us slowly abandon joy because we become too concerned with being appropriate versions of adulthood. Everything has to be productive, meaningful, useful, impressive. And I guess somewhere along the way, many of us stop asking, what brings me joy? And start asking, what makes me acceptable? And those are very different questions. Because there was something deeply regulating about sitting there with my kids laughing over silly puzzle pieces. There was no pressure or performance or outcome to prove. There's just presence. And I think play does something really important to the nervous system. I think genuine play reminds the body that it's safe enough to soften, safe enough to engage, safe enough to exist without constantly evaluating itself. And honestly, I think many adults are starving for that. I don't know. The other day I was sitting at the table working on a puzzle again, and I hit that moment where nothing was clicking. If you again, if you do puzzles, do you, you know, maybe you recognize those moments where your brain is just like blank, where every piece you pick up feels wrong. And I could get, I could feel myself getting super restless. And then I had that urge to hurry, to make something happen, to force progress. And underneath that, there was a subtle discomfort. Because when nothing is happening externally, we often assume nothing is happening internally either. But instead of pushing harder, I just stayed. And slowly my body started settling. And this isn't because I forced it to calm down. It was because I stopped fighting the moment I was in. Eventually I found one piece and then another and then another. And suddenly something started coming together. And it made me realize how often growth works like that, super quiet, under the surface. Long before there's visible evidence. And maybe that's why we become discouraged so easily. Because we think transformation should always look dramatic. But so much of healing looks ordinary. It looks like staying, it looks like returning, it looks like trying again. It looks like sitting with confusion without deciding your failing. So then there was another moment that really, really stayed with me. See, I told you, learned a lot about puzzles. Keeps going. I was looking for a specific piece, and in my mind, I had already decided what I was searching for. I thought I was looking for something that looked like feet. So I kept scanning for something that matched that image. And I couldn't find it anywhere until eventually I realized it wasn't feet at all. It was part of a foot and part of an arm. And I had spent all of that time searching from an assumption that it that was never accurate to begin with. So I just laughed when I realized it because I thought, how often do we do that in our lives? How often do we decide ahead of time what love should look like, what success should look like, what healing should look like, what we should look like. And then spend years searching in the wrong places because we're attached to an image we create in our minds instead of seeing what's actually there. And puzzles don't let you force reality into your assumptions. They only respond to truth, to shape, to alignment, to what actually fits. And so then I realized something else. Puzzles don't reward almost. You can try to force a piece in, you can convince yourself it fits, you can push harder, but if it isn't right, it isn't right. And I guess that hit me, you know, again, deeply. So because I think so many of us spend years trying to force almost into permanence, almost understood, almost loved, almost safe, almost fulfilled. And we just override the quiet knowing that we have inside ourselves because we want it to work so, so badly. But there is a difference between something fitting and something being forced. And our nervous system knows the difference, even when our mind tries to negotiate with it. So then there are those moments where I stare at the same section for so long that everything starts to blur together. And eventually the best thing that I can do is walk away, right? And every single time I come back later, I see something I couldn't see before. Not because the puzzle changed, but because I did. And maybe that's true for life too. Maybe clarity doesn't always come from trying harder. Maybe sometimes it comes from resting, from creating space, from allowing yourself to return with new eyes. And I guess through all of this, I've also started thinking differently about pace, because it does take me longer to finish puzzles. And for a for a long time I thought slower meant lesser. And now I'm starting to wonder: what if my pace is actually part of my experience? What if slowness allows me to notice things I would miss otherwise? What if slower doesn't mean incapable? What if it means present? And honestly, maybe one of the biggest things puzzles have taught me is that I was never someone who couldn't do puzzles. I was someone who decided I couldn't. And those are not the same thing. And now I keep wondering, how many other things in life have I quietly ruled myself out of because of an identity I formed years ago? How many parts of ourselves are waiting patiently for us to revisit them with maybe softer eyes? So when I really sit with everything puzzles have been teaching me, it's so much more than patience. They've taught me that not everything comes together immediately, that progress is still progress, even when it's slow, that forcing something doesn't make it aligned, that stepping away isn't failure, that comparison steals presence, that joy really matters, that play really matters, that my nervous system softens when I stop trying to perform my worthiness. That healing is sometimes much quieter than we expect it to be. And maybe most importantly, they've taught me that life is not always something we solve all at once. Sometimes it's something we learn piece by piece, slowly, tenderly, patiently. And maybe the things that seem the smallest, like sitting quietly at a table doing a puzzle, are actually the places where we slowly come back to ourselves. Maybe not through force or perfection, but through presence, through curiosity, can't say that word. Through curiosity, through allowing ourselves to stay long enough for something to begin taking shape. And maybe that's all any of us are really doing here. Learning how to trust the shape of our lives before we can fully see the whole picture. All right, everybody. Thank you again for listening, and I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful, joy filled, fun filled week. Talk to you next time. Bye.