Speed Scrabble

 I’ve always enjoyed the board game Scrabble, though sometimes I’ve become impatient at its slow pace and drawn-out finish. Nowadays, Jim and I (and some of our kids when they visit) play ‘Speed Scrabble.’ Like the board game, each player initially receives seven lettered tiles. Instead of creating one large crossword on a board, each player creates an individual crossword in front of them. Every time any player uses all their available tiles, everyone picks another tile until they are gone. Then the first person to complete their crossword using all their tiles wins.

The last few weeks of working on my memoir have been stressful. Initially, I was weaving a tapestry of my personal narrative. Then I read Bill Stride’s memoir of schizophrenia, Voices Inside Me and realized I needed the recollections of people around me to balance my own distorted perceptions. In my manic mind, everything I thought and did was completely rational, until I was injected with a powerful anti-psychotic, slept for a day and a half, and woke up in a sane mind and shattered heart.

I imagined weaving these recollections into my story, intermingled with my memories for a richer, fuller tapestry.

But the two interviews I’m processing this month point in totally new directions. It’s overwhelming. How can I pull apart this tapestry I’ve woven and start fresh?

Then this morning I thought of Speed Scrabble. In that game, it doesn’t matter at all whether you have ever created words with all your tiles in any of the turns. Only the last round matters, finishing a crossword using all of the tiles in front of you.

Sometimes when I play, I create a beautiful, elegant, long word (maybe even with an X, J, or even Q) and build my crossword around its perfection. Then comes a crisis point where I simply can’t fit more tiles onto the existing structure. With great reluctance, I dismantle my work and start fresh. But it’s not like ripping a tapestry apart or knocking a house down. It’s just playing around with the tiles, experimenting with new combination of letters to form a complete crossword structure.

Realizing that this morning helped me over the latest panic. I don’t have to destroy what I’ve made. I just need to play around with the pieces and discover new connections.