The Time Tetris Transformed Me

Play is the polar opposite of trauma.

Hi, I do not regret to inform you that you have not heard from me for over two weeks because I have been busy playing Tetris. Thank you for your thoughts in this difficult time. 🙃

Forgive me for this departure from the depths, but the truth is:

I’ve been absent here, so as to not be absent to myself.

I’ve spent the last fourteen days filling literal and figurative holes. I’ve been hard dropping tetriminos on a matrix, spinning shapes into submission, letting the little wins of lines cleared light me up. You didn’t read that wrong—I really am writing about video games right now.¹

I’ve been playing on purpose.

Fourteen days ago a surgeon at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota drilled around forty holes into the bones of my knees in a hail Mary attempt at saving my dying thirty-five year old joints for what I hope is a long life to come. You might remember me talking about my Swiss Cheese Knees back in March, while recovering from this same bilateral knee surgery the first time.² I’ve shared about the grief of the fact that I went through the hell of that surgery recovery only for my bones to have zero new growth.³

Since I am now probably hole-ier than thou, I would like to take the liberty of talking about holes and hearts and happiness in healing. It turns out, humans in the star-spangled US of A have a hard time doing the hidden work of healing.

Pain has a way of pulling back the curtain on the places we still believe our personhood is tethered to what we produce.

Day after ouchie post-op day, I found myself reaching for my phone to type up some fragment of an Instagram caption or pretty little poem wrested from my still-healing wounds. As a poet and perpetual-person-on-the-internet, I have been noticing my penchant to stitch each and every day into a doily for your darkness.

Sure, part of my soul says, I can turn surgery into something stunning.

Here, the little performer prancing along the platform of my problems announces, I will make us potpourri from pain!

You might recognize the phenomenon. Most of us are prone to unravel the slip knot of knowing what our bodies need and, instead, tether ourselves to what pleases others. We tie the thread of our attention to anything that gives a glimmer of “gratitude” back. Jobs. Family. Friends. Projects.

It’s hard to hold attention toward what hurts, because a bruise can’t bless you back.

The most important ways we heal usually remain hidden.

I’m reminded of words I wrote in The Book of Common Courage:

“Sometimes rest

is the most courageous

work of all.”⁴

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The thing I might love most about Tetris is that when I am playing it, I cannot play performer or poet. When I am searching for spots to place a shape, I cannot search for the meaning in my misery. In Tetris, there is only room for the happy delight of filling in holes.

I have not played video games since I was a lonely kid with a Gameboy. I’ve preferred to spend my pennies on pastimes like books and hikes, one of which has become increasingly unreachable in the last year. A little over a week before surgery, we had pizza on a terrace with two of our closest friends and two new ones who were passing through Colorado on their way back to California. While Sarah and I melted into puddles of bliss eating Jelly and Jalapeño Popper GF Pizza—one of the very best GF pizzas in Colorado, I might add—⁵our new friend Nico lit up like a Christmas tree telling us about his favorite video game. “Whoa,” I said, slack-jawed in recognition. “You are talking about that game like I talk about foraging and hiking.”

I saw Nico’s awe and started asking questions. By the time I’d polished off the last sacred slice, I was convinced—we need to start playing video games.

Here was an adventure that would be accessible to me in my six post-surgery weeks of not being able to stand or walk. Here was a way to inject play into pain.

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Neither Ryan nor I wanted to go through yet one more hard thing. But if I am going to walk for the next decade and beyond, we had to give this surgery one more shot. All summer, sandwiched between these two major surgeries, I wrote the majority of my next book, and the thing that surprised me the most was how hilarious it is. Horrible things happened to me, but hilarious things did too. Across the pages filled with stories of pain, humor served as helium, turning something bleak into a balloon. As we approached surgery again, hearts heavy at the poor odds we are facing, I took a page from my own book and decided to fill our laments with levity.

Ryan and I bought a Nintendo Switch and it took over an hour for us “great recession” millennials to comprehend that you can purchase games digitally as well as on cartridges. Our Sega Genesis and Gameboy cartridge-shaped minds struggled to grasp that this could work just like our Apple TV. Bless. Us. That’s where the laughter started—in feeling old. And it just never stopped.

We played Mario Kart on the plane flying over America’s heartland on the way to Minnesota for surgery on my dead bones. I raced to Mayo fueled by gallows humor and glee, playing as the character Dry Bones, obviously. Instead of steeling ourselves for the hard weeks ahead, we leaned hard into happiness. Some of you have probably seen—for this surgery recovery I needed an additional wheelchair to make our two-story house work for total non-weight-bearing. So, we bought an uber-lightweight mobility scooter on Amazon and christened her “Toots.”⁶ We set out for surgery with silliness, making videos in the airport of me on Toots, zooming through a frame of flight departure times. Toot toot. Disabled joy coming through!

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Play has been a powerful way of disarming pain.

Play is the polar opposite of trauma. Studies show it.⁷ And while I cannot control my circumstances, I can choose the posture I take while wandering through them.

Even as I am lamenting the pain of Avascular Necrosis and being on the receiving end of a power tool, even as I groan through the inconvenience of putting on pants weeble-wobbling on the toilet since my bones are too weak to handle standing without shattering, I am leaning towards levity.

I’ve experienced medical trauma upon trauma for the last year plus. And, while I am feeling far from the near-death place my body visited last summer, I am keenly aware that the fight for a full and thriving life is far from over.

The ancients called the joy of the Lord their strength. While the admonition to rejoice always has been thrust upon me, and perhaps you, as a weapon—a little silver-tongued sword to slice away feeling sad because some divine being is going to make everything okay someday—I am learning to turn that weapon into a welcome. I am smelting the sword in the fire of my frustrations and lining my life with the silver of silliness instead. Watch me glint. Watch me laugh. Watch how a shitty thing can shine when you refuse to take a sword to your sadness, because you’ve given your sadness a friend named silliness instead.

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Ryan went back to work yesterday after two weeks of bringing me ice packs and drinks and little treats like it was his purpose in life. Alas, my diseases are not his purpose in life, and he’s back to work as a hospice chaplain.⁸ But can I just brag for a moment? This surgery is super painful—as it turns out, there are nerve endings inside our bones and they get rather grouchy when someone drills into them. But the best thing has happened in these hard and exhausting days of feeling approximately like a steaming turd.

Togetherness.

Tenderness.

Delight.

Last time I had this surgery, I had to recover far away from my partner at my parents’ home in Montana, because the demands of total non-weight-bearing were too much for us to figure out in our very not-wheelchair-accessible home. This time our imaginations were stretched by the gift of experience. I’ve written here before about how we scrambled to make our home accessible for my surgery recovery—and how I’m making silly videos of using my rented stairlift, which I have named my Chairiot.⁹

We spent the last two weeks treating my post-op pain with play. I napped more hours than perhaps ever before in my type A non-napping life and in my waking hours, we almost beat the entire beginner’s version of Tetris Effect. That last level is currently kicking our asses. (I also started playing the Hogwarts Legacy game, because duh.) I found myself mesmerized by the Tetris matrix, and even in less intense post-op pain while playing. Curious soul that I am, I did I little Google Scholar geeking, and lo and behold: Tetris has been found to improve brain efficiency, reduce intrusive memories of trauma, reduce stress, increase healthy grey matter in the brain in PTSD survivors, and lower levels of anxiety. There is a method to our mirth!

As the day drew closer for Ryan to return to work, my attention became more focused. As the long days of nausea and pain and annoyance at doing simple things wore on, I relinquished my reflex to write and share about the meaning hidden in every little thing. The time was too precious and too personal to turn into a poem. Somewhere along the way, I realized that getting all of this time to be together was a gift. And a gift cloaked in grief is still a gift.

My excessive metaphor-stretching today might be emerging from the fact that I’m literally praying for the stem cells injected into the holes in my femurs to turn into new bone. Even so, I can’t help but honor the hollow places in our stories and bodies as the spaces most primed for transformation.

The best part about living in a body that is legitimately breaking (sorry not sorry to those of you who hate the word broken) is that the holes in your health can become the place love drops in.

The thing is: you have to see your own emptiness and let those close to you see it too. You can’t turn away from your own tetris.

Look softly at the matrix of your life, even in the miserable moments, and you’ll find the delight of watching the pieces fit. Contrary to what a capitalist culture has likely taught you, your personhood isn’t bound up in your productivity. No medical malady or trauma can take the you-ness of you away, a fact you just might remember as you play.

—KJ

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P.S. Please enjoy this video of the day Ryan convinced me to wander through Garden of the Gods on Toots. While the day ended with me back in bed feeling rough, the delight was more than worth it. Ryan says this is his best camerawork yet, and I have to agree…

1. Particularly, Tetris Effect, which, whoa, has such a mesmerizing, calming yet generative quality!

2. Patience achieves everything.

3. Hope is too heavy to hold.

4. Very obvious spoiler: most of us authors write the words we most need.

5. There are three places in Colorado that make GF pizza that truly lives up to the moniker of “pizza.” And since I am not a hoarder, I shall spill the secret of this one—it’s from “Purgatory” at Scileppi’s at The Old Stone Church in Castle Rock. I kid you not—the jelly on this pizza is a divine revelation.

6. Here’s that link again (an affiliate link, to fund my gaming and reading addiction 😉). The scooter is not on as great a sale as we got, but it’s still worth every penny. I cannot express how far superior this scooter is to most mobility scooters out there in sheer convenience. https://amzn.to/4dOC0tv

7. Such as: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9720153/#:~:text=Ubiquitously%2C%20tactile%20stimuli%20functions%20to,may%20be%20altered%20by%20trauma. And: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/#:~:text=In%20preschool%20children%2C%20quality%20of,social%20support%20in%20traumatized%20children.

8. Thankfully, he now works fifteen minutes away and can come home for lunch to help me with things that remain out of my wheelchaired reach. Also, if you’d like to read Ryan’s rather wise words, you can subscribe to his substack,

Fleeing Tarshish

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9. Here’s that piece, about what self-care really can look like:

We can do hard things, but we don’t have to make them harder.