“When I Was Seven Years Old, My Dad Said Something To Me That To This Day Is The Reason I Will Die

“When I was seven years old, my dad said something to me that to this day is the reason I will die alone. Very happily, I may add. But I was seven years old, I didn’t know what life was. I didn’t know what existence was, how the fuck would I know? So I thought I’d ask my dad because he can fix a computer, so he must know. So I was like, “Dad, what do we all do? What’s the meaning of life? Why are we all here? What what the fuck?” And my dad loves his kids, so he wants to explain to his son in a way that he’ll understand, but unfortunately, his son’s a fuckhead. So he has to explain it in a way that a fuckhead will understand, and he accidentally did it perfectly, and it’s stuck with me since then. This is what he said, right? I’m seven years old. He goes, “All right, buddy. Just imagine that your life, my life, everyone else’s individual life. Imagine all of our lives are like our own individual jigsaw puzzles. As we’re going through life, we’re just slowly piecing it together, bit by bit, based on experiences and lessons that we’ve learned, until we get the best picture, but the thing is everyone has also lost the box for their jigsaw. So none of us know what the image we’re trying to make is, we’re just confidently fucking guessing. So the best way to do a jigsaw, when you don’t have the image to work off, is to start from the outside, the sides and the four corners. Family. Friends. Hobbies/interests. Job. Now obviously, as you go through life, some of these bits are subject to change. Sometimes you’ll make new friends, and you’ll lose contact with old friends so you gotta move this corner around a bit. Sometimes you’ll get a job. That means you can’t have a certain hobby. You gotta decide then, "Do I want more me time or do I want more work time?” You gotta move the stuff around. Sometimes you’ll have a family member that dies, and they’ll leave a big hole in your life. In that moment you’ll have to find a way to fill that void, otherwise you’ll be incomplete forever.“ Now, that made perfect sense to me, because I was seven years old. I fucking loved jigsaws. So I was like, "All right, okay. So once you’ve got the stuff on the outside, what’s the main bit of the image? What we are all working towards?” And he goes, “Well, that’s the partner piece. You and this perfect person who you’ve never met before to come out of nowhere, fit your life perfectly, complete you and make you whole for the first time in your life, much like your mother did for me.” Seven. Seven years old. I wish you just said, “Ice cream!” And we could have fucked off. And even though what he said sounds sweet and whatever, what it manifested in my seven-year-old brain was this, “If you are not with someone, you are broken. If you are not with someone, you are incomplete. If you are not with someone, you are not whole.” And that’s not just something my dad made me feel, that’s something that we as a society have made every single child born in the last 40 years feel. Every Disney princess has a prince, every prince has a princess, every television show or movie always has a character in it that doesn’t want to be in a relationship. They’re happy with who they are. But then by the end of the series, guess what? They were wrong! They were wrong for wanting to be alone, what a fucking idiot. Everyone needs someone, (…) Divorce, an entirely common thing that there is nothing wrong with. When you’re growing up and your friends’ parents get divorced, you’re told to not talk about it or mention it to them because it’s taboo, and it is taboo is because every relationship on the outside is perfect, because none of us are willing to admit that none of us know what the fuck we’re doing. And when you raise children in that world, where everything points towards love and everything’s perfect on the outside, when you’ve raised them for 18 fucking years, when we become an adult for the first time in our late teens and our early 20s, we’re so terrified. We’re so trying to be an adult that some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw piece and just fucking jam them into our jigsaws anyway, denying that they clearly don’t fit.”

— Daniel Sloss, from “Jigsaw”