Jigsaw. No Box. Wrong Picture.

How are we supposed to put ourselves together? When there is no picture? When the picture on the box doesn’t match the pieces in the box?

I have been thinking about this most of my life because I am adopted. My parents were given a baby - me- who was a heap of pieces, no box. I was given a bewildering new set of people, different smells, different voices, wrong picture. All the time my brain was trying to make a pattern. That’s the brain’s job. It’s a pattern-recogniser. What did my brain gather, as we landed on what felt like a new planet?

Here’a a picture of Mrs Winterson looking as if she comes from another century - and I guess that’s true.

She was born in 1922. Her parents were born in the 1890s. The world I was raised in was that world - coal fires, stone sink, outside toilet, memories of Queen Victoria. Two World Wars. Paraffin lamps.

Materially, we had not much. Life, for me, was the excitement of life itself. Piecing it together. And every piece I could cut and file for myself, suggested a different picture to the one Mrs W was painting on the lid of the box. I don’t blame her. She wanted to see where we were going, just as much as I did, only, we were not going to the same place. We valued different things.

Some of you will know that I left home at 16, because I had fallen in love with another girl, and when I told Mrs W that my love made me happy, she asked ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’

She was a violent philosopher.

It was a good question - and it became a good title for another book

- and because books lead to other books, my early, and continuing, unstoppable, volley of questions about what matters - what damn well matters - has brought me where I am now. At least for now.

I have just finished my next book. It’s called One Aladdin Two Lamps.

How can we know the real from the counterfeit? What’s worthwhile and what’s worthless? Where we put our energy and and where we conserve it? It’s a book of questions and stories and ideas and some answers - and how to start from an impossible place and not stay there. And that might mean doubting the picture on the box that says this is what things should look like, and it might mean carefully cutting and filing and sanding some new pieces. Not once. Often. Always.

I was clearing out some stuff, as you do in the new year, and I came across one of my birth certificates (I have two - which suits a Gemini Moon). It’s the Winterson one I found, and it shows my adoption date as January 21. Just a few days after Mrs W’s birthday, and not near mine. So I suppose I get another birthday too. Jigsaw pieces from different lives. Different pictures on the box.

Someone once asked me, at an event, ‘what would you have been if you hadn’t been a writer?’

Easy. A criminal.

My half-brothers were both criminals. One is dead. One not. If I had stayed in that original family I could have run our gang. Made our fortune. Hot-tubs, spray-tans, gravel-drive, four-car garage, shotgun cabinet. Offshore accounts. Big in Bitcoin.

But I am adopted. That life disappeared. Winterson-world appeared. The picture on the box said Missionary.

Well, here I am. And it seems closer to the truth because I do want to say to people - just like the doorstep evangelists - ‘is there a missing piece?’ Except it’s not a Jesus Piece. And it’s not one piece. Everything I have written, everything I have done, these last forty years - sometimes in the wilderness, sometimes in the luxe-tent, has been a search for missing pieces. Boxes and boxes of them.

Mine. Yours. Ours.

So many of us feel that we don’t fit. Don’t fit in. We look for someone, or something else, to make sense of us, provide the missing pieces. The alt-right is promising us that is holds the missing pieces. Politics is the new religion. Believe and be Saved.

Fake tokens work, for a while, but they have no value. A genuine new piece is more than a new person or a new job or a new leader. The new piece might manifest on the outside, but not before it has taken its place on the inside. This is not superficial change. When something is really new, everything that already exists alters in relation to it. You know this from whatever has been the most significant thing in your life so far. It wasn’t only your present that changed, but how you understood your past, how you visualised your future.

I am not saying that every new piece we find is seismic in its effect on us - we do small work in small ways - those little pieces that suddenly give us a part of the picture we never recognised before. What I am saying is that the work to be done is our work - individually, regularly, because if we are not searching for pieces that fit our changing, growing, desiring, picture, we are likely being fitted into someone else’s picture.

Trying to cut new pieces, into, out of, the madness of the daily jigsaw, is the only way to build a picture of Self and World that feels authentic.

Yes, we have to manage our practical lives, and be good citizens as best we can, but the outward-facing us is soon exhausted, if the inward-facing us isn’t spending some time on our jigsaw.

What is the picture that is you?