Puzzle pieces.

It’s like trying to fit a piece of puzzle into a place where it doesn’t belong.

You keep wanting to fit it, wanting to be like unique, different from everyone else, and yet, fitting into the big picture. It’s always nice to know the picture would never be complete without you- I guess that’s why team spirit is so important. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that without you, there would always be a missing piece.

But most places aren’t like that. Most companies, schools, workplaces… just aren’t like that. You’re indispensable and unique only if you’re part of the most important part of the puzzle, like a senior staff or a manager or a boss- forming part of the face of a main character or an intricate detail. Most other people, however, are a plain blue, or green, or khaki, forming part of the homoegenous sky, or grassy field or sandy beach. Every piece looks nearly quite the same. You’re important, but only because anything missing would spoil the final product, not because you were made to feel special on your own in any way.

Over the past few weeks, especially since returning from Cambodia, I’d been praying and asking God to show me where my place was, and where I fit in. I had no answer for the longest time, then suddenly, things became crystal clear.

The startling contrast of events which happened within the past 2 weeks just after I had returned from Cambodia and in answer to my prayers was almost uncanny. It seemed as if without a little drama to shake things up a little, there would be no way to capture my attention to make what seemed so obvious to the Creator so ambivalent to me.

It reminded me of the children at the Safe House in Cambodia, who were rescued from abusive families who tortured them physically and sexually and now sheltered in a home of safety and love. It reminded me of the day we spent with them, as they all crowded round pieces of a jigsaw puzzle trying to piece together the picture of a red-haired girl jubilantly taking a hairy dog out for a walk. Because the children were so young, each piece seemed to be full of possibility to be the next Perfect Fit and was enthusiastically placed in each empty space in various positions, but alas, it was not- even though it was so clear to me from the beginning. In the same way, I think I just kept thinking, that yes, it would be possible for me to be this sort of Eye doctor, or surgeon, or internist, or neurologist… when none was the right fit for me. Worse, as more and more of my friends settle to find their own comfortable spot in the grand picture, my misplacement became more obvious, more stark, more uncomfortable.

For the longest time, I thought both public health and Eye were places I could be in.  

I thought I might be a good fit for Eye. And so did many others. But God seemed to know the end from the beginning, and I found out later, that was all.

I got into trouble in the department last week. No matter how hard I tried to explain the misunderstanding, my defenses were like quicksand. That night, full of tears, I wept. I wept at the way the situation was handled, that accusations were made without having heard me out. The next day was filled with explaining myself and apologizing to various people, and it was most painful. It was discouraging and a real setback. In the same week, however, I was asked to make a presentation at the hospital-wide conference to all the senior doctors about my new proposal to link our medical social worker department with a non-profit community organization, Healthserve, to better aid our patients who are migrants. There was rousing support and encouragement from the ground and senior management. On the same day of the presentation, was also the opportunity to present my research project in public health at a poster competition at a health forum. It was on the public’s attitudes, knowledge and stigma towards dementia, so as to better educate communities about this illness. I had my hospital presentation at 730am that morning, the poster competition and presentation in front of a panel of judges at noon at a different hospital, then had to return to my previous hospital to go on my thirty-hour overnight Eye call in the evening. A crazy day it was indeed, only to have myself find out the next day that I had won first prize in the competition and that my research paper in dementia was accepted to be published in a journal. In the same week of the humiliating incident, I was asked to be interviewed by a TV station, a radio station and a magazine for the work I’d been doing in raising public awareness of depression and eating disorders among youth.

All this while I think I’ve been deceiving myself trying to think I could be good in something most people were dying to be a part of, not realizing that perhaps, God was showing me my gifts lay elsewhere.  

I remember when we were completing that jigsaw puzzle, there was a missing space in the final product, and also a jigsaw piece which just wouldn’t fit. The kids, young and naïve at heart, squeezed the blue and green jigsaw piece in the predominantly pink, yellow and cream picture, only realizing in a bit that hey, this didn’t belong in this picture at all.

It was a puzzle piece in the wrong box!

And perhaps it is so with us, that we try so very hard to be part of something we were never meant to be a part of, realizing only much later, that perhaps, it might not be because we were wrong, or a mistake or a disaster (which might seem like it), but maybe, just meant for something else, something different, part of another grand masterpiece altogether.

We might feel like rejects, not because we are, but because we are in the wrong place.

I tried to be a part of Eye but the string of uncannily unfortunate events lay in too stark a contrast to the unexpectedly victorious and gleaming surprises that came my way, too.

I find myself trying too hard to please others, and still, being scolded, getting put down, feeling inadequate, day after day, week after week. I wonder if work will be like this forever. I wonder how long I will try to fit myself into a space that my edges cannot fit into, and which refuses to contain a jigsaw piece like me.

The fact is, I refuse to be a patch of green in grass, or a blue in the sky. I want to be where I matter, where people matter, and where human beings aren’t just machines or gears in a pulley system. I want to be where ideas matter, where I can create and plan and execute things, and not just continually emulate or copy, which what most of medicine is all about- copying the model of what has already been stated to be perfect, the gold standard. I don’t know if that place exists, if I might ever find the puzzle box that I belong to, if I might ever see the picture on that box in which I play a part that actually matters.

Maybe I am too proud. Maybe I have an inherent attitude problem which gets me into trouble all the time. Maybe I am a rebel.

Despondency is feeling that you don’t belong; hope is knowing that you do, just somewhere else. Despondency is feeling like you were a mistake; hope is knowing that you’re not.

Maybe you’re not a mistake. Maybe you’re not a reject.

 

Maybe you’re just that missing puzzle piece waiting to find the box it belongs to.