Jigsaw

(This article is inspired by Danielle Sloss’s “Jigsaw” concept of life. In the end, is an example from my personal life).

Every human’s life is a jigsaw puzzle. All our life we slowly piece our jigsaw together with experiences and lessons that we gain over time, all trying to create our best possible picture. There is one problem though. We have all lost the boxes of our jigsaws. So we don’t know the image we are working to achieve. We’re just confidently guessing where each piece goes. And because we don’t know the original image, we all start from the outside (the 4 corners) which is our

1. Family

2. Friends

3. Hobbies

4. Profession

Now, as time passes and we ‘grow’, we learn to move our pieces sometimes. Some of us may lose our friends over time. Others don’t, and they stay in touch with their childhood friends for life, but their hobbies and their job can’t co-exist. They have to compromise on that. Some of us lose our family members as we grow up. The point here is that we move our puzzle pieces around a bit to fill the voids so that we’re not incomplete forever.

We have our four corners. What is the middle piece? What are we all working towards? Society answers this question: “Your partner who completes you and makes you whole”. This lesson from the society also makes us think that “If we aren’t with someone, we’re incomplete”. Nowadays, everyone agrees with this, as a society, and this is the same that we are exposed to in movies, shows and children’s fairy tales. Similarly, society has made divorce a taboo. Every relationship on the outside is supposed to be perfect, no matter how fucked up it might be from the inside. We are growing into our adulthood, just so terrified of being alone, that we take the wrong jigsaw piece, (that is our “better halves” or “special-others”,) and jam them into our jigsaws anyhow. We move the rest of the pieces, like hobbies and family, to make the wrong piece fit in the centre of our life. And this is all because we much rather have ”someone” than “no one”.

Once we have grown up however we realize that nobody else is a jigsaw “piece”. Each individual out there owns his own jigsaw puzzle. You can’t expect one of them to just give up theirs and come fit into yours and of course vice versa. But now that you are “in love”, you two want to make your jigsaw together. The idea of making a jigsaw puzzle with someone may seem awesome initially, but equally, unfortunately, the amount of time spent making something does not guarantee an equal amount of success. Years and years later looking back at your life, you may end up not recognising your own jigsaw.

For the last 50 years, humans have romanticized the idea of romance itself. Today there is a higher chance that you are more in love with the idea of "being in love" than that you are in love with the person that you are in a relationship with. (If this relates to you, I am so sorry for you). I am not arguing that it’s not impossible for you to find love. But that out of 7.5 billion people in the world, you found your soulmate, in your 20s, also living close to you, raises doubts, No!? I say all the relationships now are actually just a bunch of people who never took time to learn how to be alone and love themselves and so they employed someone else to do it for them. A relationship should be easy to handle. You must get out of it the moment it turns difficult. There must be no compromise if it doesn’t come to you naturally, because that would mean changing who you are. And that would mean hating yourself. If you have to change yourself to make your partner love you, your partner does not love 100% of who you are but he or she loves an idea of you, that exists in his/her mind. Most of us today stay in a relationship because it is easier to be in it than to get out of it.

Instead, if you can find something that makes you truly happy, and that can be literally anything, make it the centre of your jigsaw. Everything else will naturally fit around it. For some of you, I acknowledge it might be your partners. However, also remember that the concept of having found a soul mate is one of the rarest phenomena in the world. Yet it is also the most commonly-thought-of-as-happened too. Instead, we all have to learn to love ourselves first before we allow someone else to do it as well. If we love ourselves 20/100, we will treat someone like a god(dess) if they gave us just 50/100 of the love. Mind you that we deserve 100% of love in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with being single and working on ourselves to know who we are and what we want. And that’s happiness beyond any relationship. Let me repeat, there are 7.5 billion of us on here, and most of us find our soul mates in a radius of 50 kilometres or less, mostly within the first quarter of our life too …

Here’s an example: My last girlfriend was without a doubt the single worst human being I’ve ever met in my life. Manipulation was her hobby. All through our relationship, she wanted to do everything in her power to destroy my jigsaw puzzle so the only one I would be left to play with would be hers. A vindictively intelligent woman that she was (and spiteful to the core too) she created this perfect persona of herself that she acted out in public. Everyone fell in love with that My friends fell in love with that, my family fell in love with that, even I fell in love with that. But behind closed doors, she was entirely different. She knew I wouldn’t have an argument If I went out in the real world. If I told anyone, “She’s being a bitch.” they all would be like, “She’s fucking perfect. How are you ruining this Awais?” She knew how insecure I was and she would find those insecurities and use them against me to make me doubt myself. As a trivial example: she would actually criticize the way I even sat (with a little arch back because I am lean and tall but these reasons were too hard for her to process). Sitting with her thus was a literal, continual problem. She would find people that I loved and trusted and then turn me on them so that she would be the centre of my life.

For the first time in my life then, I was actually sad. At various instances, I was like, “Is this it? … Is this my life now …?” One day thus I snapped because my mind could take it no more. Sitting in a deserted café, it did the old “It’s not you, It’s me” routine. I have no recollection of planning this breakup and my mind as I believe know, literally acted on its own to save me. Then the first few months were toughest because she had me dependent and desperate for her. I had no jigsaw. This time now that I have made my jigsaw made up from scratch, I have grown to be paranoid of it. Let alone letting someone be in the centre, I cannot let anyone come anywhere near it now. But with time I know, I’ll improve.

Image added to be the cover