Being colorblind, there are a lot of fun stories that come along with the condition. That’s why I am making another colorblind post because there is more to what I just said in the first post about color blindness: “The Rough (but not really) Life of A Colorblind Person”. However, this post is going to be different. In the previous post, I listed all the difficulties, stereotypes, and misconceptions to being colorblind, but this post is about the giant 2000 puzzle piece laying in my basement, and how it has helped me.

I used to do a lot of puzzles when I was much younger, and they weren’t much of a struggle either. I would do 100, 500, and 1000 piece puzzles with my family, so I thought a 2000 puzzle piece would be pretty reasonable for my current age. It was a long time ago since I did a puzzle piece, so I was in shock when I saw the magnitude of the puzzle. Other than the size of this puzzle, it is not kind to those who are colorblind (But… I guess any puzzle piece isn’t that kind to those who are colorblind). With the puzzles being so small, I can’t put together pieces just by looking at details, but I also have to use the colors to help me as well. However, as you already know colors aren’t really my best friend.

When I first started, I knew the good old strategy of finding the corner and side pieces and putting the frame together. That part I find to be fairly easy despite my issues with colors. It’s easy to match the patterns on the side pieces since there aren’t many of them and are pretty distinct from the rest of the pile. But after that was finished, I was pretty clueless. As you can see from the bottom left of the puzzle, there was an attempt at the sea part of the puzzle. In this portion, I found a lot of trouble since there are so many different sea pieces and the shades of blue all look the same to me. I can’t really go off the pattern of the puzzles because the patterns or details are all the same. This took me at least a couple of hours before I realized I wasn’t really getting anywhere. For an exercise that meant to be fun and relaxing, I was pretty enraged at myself for being so clueless. I mean it seems silly to me now that I was mad over something like this, but it’s still a downer for sure.

If you thought I was hopeless at first, then you will think I am lost cause at this point. This puzzle was started on March 26th and as you can see there isn’t much progress. The boat, which I started on March 27, was just finished a couple of days ago on April 10th. It took 2 weeks to finish %3.35 of the puzzle. To be fair, I didn’t work on it every day, but I worked on it for quite a bit. You would think the boat would not take that long, but some of the pieces were just solid colors, and finding the pieces amongst the other ones was crazy difficult. All the pieces are turned over, so I can see all the pieces but that doesn’t really help me at all since there are so many. However, it wasn’t a waste of time (maybe). Through a gruesome couple of days, I had developed an ability to find and put together the boat pieces more efficiently. After trying to differentiate the blues of the boat from the blues of the sea, I became more aware of minute details on the puzzle pieces. I started even focusing on the edges of the puzzle and getting better at spotting differences between the colors. Being able to find the pieces was so much easier now that I could start telling the difference between the different blues and find the fine details.

With the house it’s a bit of a different story, I started that yesterday (April 14) and it’s going pretty well. I started to use color a bit more with pattern identification. After the sea shenanigans, I mostly did the boat by looking at patterns and key details. The colors didn’t help entirely, but I got better at identifying the difference between the roof blue and the sea blue. This allowed me to find the pieces much faster and easier than just by looking at patterns and the shape of the piece. When putting together the pieces, I looked more at the shape of the piece rather than blindly testing whether it was the right fit or not. This made me more efficient, and it allowed me to organize the different rooftop pieces easily. It helps that there are more definable details for the house, but using the strategies I had gained from the boat it had made it much easier. The house only took me a couple of hours, unlike the boat which drove me mad for 14 days.

That’s all I have really done with the puzzle so far, as completing the house is getting a bit harder now. I have no plans of stopping and I hope I can finish it before I head out for college. When I first opened the puzzle I really thought I had wasted my money (it was kind of expensive for no reason), but now I realize the true value of the puzzle. I mean I haven’t really finished it, but I have taken away quite a bit from it. It has not only helped me utilize my vision and increased my spatial reasoning, but also a sense of calm. Now that I am calmer when doing the puzzle, it’s a good way to relieve stress or a nice way to get off the phone for a while. I think, for anyone who is bored and wants something to do other than scroll through TikTok for three hours, they should get a puzzle (probably not 2000 because it’s too much) and just chill out. The fun thing with puzzles is that you can also multitask while doing them. It takes out the meditative part of the process, but it’s also something fun to do when listening to a podcast or something.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my story about how I am bad at puzzles and getting somewhat better. Read the other colorblind post if you haven’t, and have a good rest of your day.