When the pieces don’t fit!

Life is like a giant puzzle which we all are struggling through our individual journeys to fit together to complete the pictures that capture the stories of our lives. Pieces like the faces of family members, friends, neighbours and significant others like teachers that look together inner woven to form the patterns of our journeys and shape our lives.

Some are like photos that contain happy memories reminding us of joy, love and celebrations, have been apart of the fabric of the puzzle. Others pieces contain the people who have journey with us. People we were given to, grew-up with, meet, fell in love with, got to know. journeyed with, parted with, left and were torn from us. Then there are perhaps the pieces we rather weren’t there to tell the story. The pieces that hurt and cause us pain and sorrow.  The loves ones lost; the events that rocked us; made us question what we believed or even who we are? The things and events that confused us, annoyed us and even angered us.

Like it or not! Good or bad! Loving or evil? Each person we meet places a piece in the puzzle we must take and except and place it somewhere with in the picture which will be completed on the day we died.  The puzzle filled with the mysteries of life, which form other from the snap shots of memories left when we leave this world behind.

Some days when I pause to look and remember both the joys and the sorrows; my success and failures; the blessings and regrets, I see only confusion, mystery, doubt and frustration. As I struggle to somehow make sense of a puzzle that may actually be round. When in vein I have wasted time searching for the corner pieces and the straight edges that don’t exist.

Please tick the box, is usually where the trouble starts and the piece begin to disconnect.  Oh sure there are the boxes each of us can tick at different stages of our lives. Well most of us anyway. Male or Female, single, marriage, separated, divorced, never married, defacto you see even as the forms we must enter our information on to, must change as life evolves or mutates. Some of us and I suspect all of us lie outside the perfect box or picture the world wants to create.

Which best describes you? Living with your parents? Living with family? Living with siblings? Sharing a house?  Living as a couple? Living with extended family? To families in the same home? Live alone? And if you happen to have a disability like me, there’s the added box of lives independently, like you can live by yourself and not be independent? Now they want to added more boxes, lives in supported accommodation; lives with some support, low support or high support? The questions with their boxes to tick or not, continue.

To me the direction to tick the box proves meaningless. As we journey through life collecting the pieces of our puzzles as individuals with continuing to grow, develop abilities, skills and talents and having complex individual needs. The boxes created by a technological age, that creates the need for black and white answers leave me continually feeling like a misfit in a world the constantly wants to box me in.

The boxes are all to often where the comparisons begin . . . Once you tick a box and you are tagged with a label.  “Never married”; “Middle aged”; “Person with a disability” and “Living in the community with some support.” The trouble is once boxes are designed and tags or labels are assigned, we all begin to make judgments against norms in society to which our puzzles pieces do not conform.

Boxes are designed specifically to allow us to put like with like, group and compare to tell us what Mr or Mrs of Miss or Ms or Dr average should look like, conform not and behave like. A ‘norm’ to which any behavioural scientist like myself will tell you does not exist.

The mere fact I am a Christian Behavioural Scientist born with Cerebral Palsy should give anyone cause not to attempt to box me into a lifestyle box. I can’t help but sit here and burst into fits of laughter remembering that statistical analysis is what I am trained to do.  The irony of this blog post does not escape me. If anyone knows the endless attempt to find norms, that don’t exist, it is yours truly!  

Yet as I fight this fight. daily to shouting! I AM NOT NORMAL AND WILL NEVER BE NORMAL! THUS CAN NOT BE COMPARED OR CONFORMED NOT NORMAL! SIMPLY BECAUSE NORMAL IS A LINE ON A STATISTICAL CURVE THAT THAT MOVES CONSTANTLY OVER TIME!

POINT BLANK NORMAL DOES NOT EXIST!

So in my quest to put together the puzzle of my life, the demands to meet norms and standards other like to think they have the right to determine and dictate never fills me with warm fuzzes. No more is this true than in my home.

Forget the norms and standards that would suggest someone with a disability of my classification should not live alone;  That I am unemployable because I have epilepsy; that because I don’t have a full-time job – 4 part-time ones are not equivant because some are unpaid; Living independently with a disability means I am lonely, board isolated, depressed and therefore watch TV all day.

My daily battle continues with family members, friends, neighbours, medical professionals, health professionals and support workers is the right to make my own choices and determine how my own home looks and the activities I undertake. 

Having won the battle to live independently in my home, I find myself under constant security by well meaning people.  The assumption is my home should meet some kind of universal standard of what ‘a home’ is and how it should operate.

Apparently that doesn’t include my office and make shift art studio.  Paint brush sticking out of jars of various coloured water placed on the kitchen table; with half painted canvases and pastels rubbed in the carpet of my rented apartment seem to failed this invisible norm of what my home should look like.

Instead it has been decided that my art; my paint brushed, my manuscripts, my poetic scribble books should be put away out of sight often in inaccessible parts of my home. So to end my frustration I go and buy more supplies to play hide and seek with my support workers and well meaning friends.

So if you have any advice about pieces of the puzzle of my life and where they might  be best placed, please  remember my theory is the puzzle has no corners and norms do not apply.