(Written 1/14/23)
There are times when we all hit our wit's end. Whether we seem to have hit a wall, we've been pushed past our limit, or whatever else it may be. When we reach that point, there's not much that can stop us from falling apart.
That's what happened last night, and I'll admit, I said some things that I'm not sure I really meant. Hopefully, I've repaired the damage that I did, but I did realize a few things thanks to it.
I'm sure you all know the classic game Jenga. You have a bunch of blocks and you stack them up until you have this nice big tower and one by one you pull out the blocks. The way some people play it, you keep the blocks at your side as a sign of what you've "accomplished," but many others choose to replace them back on top. The basic premise is that your goal is to, at each turn, remove a block without the tower falling. If it falls, you lose.
Now you may be asking, "Anna, why are you explaining Jenga to us?" Let me just say, I do have a plan for this, I promise.
See, my realization last night came with an analogy. And this analogy is one that I used for a giant rant. And believe it or not, I ended up comparing my mental health to a Jenga tower.
Perhaps you've used this analogy before—the idea of everything tumbling down and crashing on your head is fairly common—but my analogy went much further than just the basic "things falling down" idea. It became this crazy idea that maybe the blocks you have are written on and some are shaped weird because someone mixed different Jenga sets together. Maybe it wasn't set on steady ground to begin with so you're not just fighting the tower but you're also fighting the "solid" ground you should be trusting. Maybe they're giant Jenga blocks and you're miniscule.
Are you starting to get my point here?
I confessed a lot of things to myself using this analogy and I found it to be pretty helpful, at least concerning my situation, and I wanted to share that with you all. Because my anxiety, depression, grief, pain, secrets, friendships, and whatever else I could think of? I added each of those to a block and now I have my own little mismatched Jenga tower that I've been playing with and honestly? It's a bit cathartic.
It's nice to know that just because something falls down, doesn't mean you can't build it back up again. It's nice to know that if you take off a piece, you don't have to put it back on, even if you've been putting the others on. It's okay to conveniently "lose" a piece, it's okay to scribble out what's written on it and write a new thing.
It's okay if it all falls on your head, as long as that doesn't bury you completely.
The reason why I'm saying this is that I've reached a point in my life where my Jenga tower seems so tall and big and I seem so minuscule that I began to fear that if it fell, I would literally die under the weight of it all. And let me tell you, that fear is terrifying. It felt like I was playing Jenga alone and every turn was just one step closer to that death, because I was the only person playing, so I couldn't win.
But someone brought up to me last night: What if we aren't the ones who made our towers so tall?
We aren't the only people who add things to our plates. Other people come along, ask us to do things or tell us to do things that we really don't want to do. All of a sudden just school and chores becomes school, chores, appointments, extra projects, babysitting siblings, going to this event and that event, going out with friends, etc.
Suddenly, you're buried under all of these things and that is honestly exhausting. But you feel like you can't let any of the blocks fall because if you did, the others might come tumbling down after it.
Coming from a girl who has let her tower fall many times—and whose tower gets bigger each time—it can be really scary to even think about letting one block fall, much less go through the action of actually letting the whole tower fall. And I'm not saying that you should go push the entire tower over and rebuild it—that would be incredibly hard to do—but I am saying that sometimes you need to change something, even if it means breaking the rules.
Maybe you hide one of the blocks you don't like underneath you while you take the next turn. (Shhh, it never existed.) Maybe you save the easy move for the next turn and take the riskier one while you can.
Maybe you let someone come near your Jenga tower and help you dislodge the blocks skillfully instead of fearfully. Because with two people, there's less risk of losing. With two people, you have two brains that approach things differently and may attack the problem from a different angle.
Whatever the case, I hope you understand what my intended meaning is. I hope you realize sometimes, our lives are like games of Jenga, and even if everything falls apart, it can be rebuilt. And even when it seems unsteady, the game's not over yet.
And please, please make sure you aren't playing alone. That's the most dangerous thing of all.