How Bananagrams solved my post-grad crisis
A seemingly silly word game was the powerful tool that helped me find my young adult voice and reframe my mindset.
When I first moved to the city, I experienced some severe writer’s/word block. My struggle to find the right words was not only unfortunate for the usual niceties required when meeting new people and starting a new job, but it was particularly bad given I was hired as a technology journalist. Even more ironic than my lack of vocabulary predicament and requirement that I write a minimum of three articles a week was the fact that I can usually never shut up. Typically, I have too many words and too little time to fit them all in. Combined with the frustration that New York was supposed to be where I found inspiration, living out my Carrie Bradshaw writer dreams in a pink Charlotte York sweater and the fact my tech knowledge stopped and started with owning an iPhone, I felt like my internal word generator was stuck, broken. I felt stuck, broken.
Like Carrie falling on her face during the fashion show on loop.
I tried channeling my inner theatre kid to “put on a character” who did have all the right words for casual conversation and trending articles with minimal edits alike, but my anxious character kept getting the part. No matter how much I rehearsed in the mirror every morning, I couldn’t stick to the script I wrote out for myself that said “today was going to be the day I had a breakthrough.”
So, in the most vibrant, bustling city in the world, all I wanted to do was go home and get away from words. Get away from stories of people who were thriving in their corporate jobs or graduate programs or blowing up on social media – especially given I didn’t really know where my job fit in on the corporate scale.
I was technically an associate editor, but I wrote an article every day, reported on breaking news, tested products and wrote unbiased reviews, helped with social media posts, and pitched my own ideas. The larger company I worked for had one culture and my team had another. The more I listened to my investment banker, consultant, and accountant friends commiserate about long days at the office against the loud music at Red Lion or Berlin or whatever West Village bar we defaulted to every weekend, I realized I didn’t have similar stories to share. And they probably wouldn’t understand mine. So I just let my words drown out against the music.
By December, I was only growing more frustrated. With it getting dark at 4:30, seasonal depression had officially kicked in and I had solidified my sad schedule. Get up, stress about work, go to work stressed, stress at work, walk home in the dark as I called my mom, come home, eat, binge watch season 8 of Love Island UK on my laptop, and repeat. Overall, it wasn’t the Friends/ How I Met Your Mother/ Sex and the City New York storyline I was hoping for.
Until one night when my roommate, Maria, helped me break the cycle with a simple invitation to play a board game.
Unlike me, Maria LOVES games – and she takes them seriously. I once witnessed her almost get violent over a game of Monopoly. So, when she invited me to play Bananagrams, I was at first hesitant, but I have a soft spot for Bananagrams. During the height of COVID lockdown, the freeform Scrabble, word-puzzle game was one of my family’s favorite pastimes although I could never get super into it due to my (also very competitive) brother’s crazy speed, which always sped up the game and rarely had me as a victor. Maria and I were on a more level playing field. I accepted and walked into our living room expecting to play one game to merely appease my roommate/ friend.
As Maria shuffled and divided 21 tiles each with her perfectly manicured and naturally long nails, I felt a rush. She left the remaining neatly in the center of our small, glass living room table and I was ready.
“And start!” She squealed as we flipped over our starting tiles.
As I quickly started turning over my letters, my brain somehow went into autopilot, forming words that I didn’t even know I knew or remembered. Words were coming out of the woodwork. From simple words like “oops” and “wow” to multi-tile words like “quotient,” I quickly and clumsily arranged abstract letters to form my little word puzzle.
“Peel!” Maria shrieked two seconds before me, signaling that she had finished making and connecting words out of her starting tiles. So, it was time to draw a new tile from the middle pile and connect it to the bigger puzzle.
That’s the thing about Bananagrams – you can have the perfect word or string of words and right when you – or your opponent(s) is finished – you have to go right back to the drawing board. Bananagrams challenged me to move things around even if I had somehow thought of the most fabulous word like “zenith” to fit the dreaded letter “Z.” If the next letter couldn’t fit in my existing puzzle, I had to rearrange, otherwise I wouldn’t finish. That didn’t make my first instinct or attempt “bad” or my ending puzzle better or worse, it just allowed me to think of more words and see things from a different perspective.
Maria kicked my ass that game.
I think I said “peel” probably twice…three times if I’m really generous. Admittedly, I was trying to get things to fit around one word, rather than being flexible with how the rest of the tiles I drew were shaking out.
I was too slow to realize that the object of the game wasn’t to make the biggest, most impressive and goofy words, but to adapt to the new letters and rearrange accordingly. It didn’t mean my first attempt was “wrong,” but with new information, in this case the letters,
I had to adjust to make the bigger picture work. Find more words to focus on making my puzzle work. Not Maria’s, but mine.
I started to see the parallel to my career and life. I was too focused on impressing people with my words.
Whether those words were the building blocks of my articles that I got defensive and doubtful over after my editor merely did his job to make my story better – or the words I used to describe my life and how it looked compared to others, I was too stuck on perfection. I wasn’t willing to adapt when my editor or life situation called for me to “peel,” and shift focus.
But that night when I saw Maria’s sprawling puzzle compared to my tiny one surrounded by scattered tiles I had yet to place, I didn’t feel defeat, but rather saw a challenge.
One I wanted to overcome.
“Another round?” I asked her as I swept the tiles, already getting ready to shuffle them.
We played until we were pretty much drunk on our own laughter that night – coming up with words and phrases that were a mix of imagination and gibberish, but it started a nightly ritual. Something I looked forward to.
For hours, Maria and I – and often our roommate and best friend Liv – would communicate by exchanging “peels” and then revealing our puzzles. I was addicted to finding new ways to work my words into each other – I was locked in to my puzzle and not thinking about Maria’s or Liv’s even though they were feet away from me.
I inevitably would start with or draw the ever-difficult “Q” or “Z” without the appropriate two “O’s” to make “Zoo,” but I found new ways to pivot. I adopted strategies that sometimes worked, and learned new ones when they didn’t.
Soon, I started to see edits at work as Maria would say “peel” – a new direction, a new challenge for me to take and have the opportunity to re-mold. I started to accept that I’d get hard assignments and receive something I didn’t understand, but I’d take it like I did one of those “Qs” or “Zs” – like a puzzle waiting for me to solve it.
I even began to view my unique career path as my own personal puzzle – only I could touch it and I didn’t have time to look at other people’s. And other people felt the same about theirs.
But like in Bananagrams, at the end, we could look at each other’s creations and learn from and appreciate them. Possibly even apply them to our next project.
I realized that instead of competing, I could build community and relationships. Like I actively was with my roommates.
I saw that when I was done with something, I had only begun my new challenge. And it was exciting.I had not only found my words again, but I was more confident than ever in playing with their structure, in sharing them with the world and my friends.
As silly or simple as it may sound, my Bananagrams addiction/ritual broke my self-doubt cycle and started a new one – the cycle of building something just to have the opportunity every day to learn from it and start over.
And thus my new cycle was born. Build, peel, pick up, repeat.