Word Search, Word Find

No one's taken my vitals and tut-tutted over my low blood pressure, or drawn my blood, or pulled me in for a surprise weigh-in, for a week now.
No one's made me drink gatorade after my pulse jumped sixty points upon standing for over a month.
Now that I no longer need to be furtive about exercising, I'm finally too tired to do it, except for the eight flights of stairs to the dorm room and early morning walks.

Being at the residency is wonderful beyond telling, and yet there are still moments when the proximity of my recent abodes is more tangible than odor. I tumble into fear, or become convinced that I've 'lost all my spark'. Time really doesn't move directly forward; the impulse of those many weeks in treatment pushes and pulls. I take desperate comfort from this as the graduating cohort, containing several of my very favorite people in the program, move toward moving on: all I can trust is that we will come back around to each other; that there are reasons why I feel such connection with them. Meanwhile, for what should be no surprise, the new crowd is composed of wonderful people, as are my own cohort and the one above that. Stunning.

As always, my brain is full of ideas, anxieties, germs of poems and essays, and my plate is full of assignments, people I need to connect with, and the bar where everyone is hanging out right now and where I should be heading. Let me step away from the MFA residency and all thoughts of Sandwich Academy and Foie Gras Farm, and try this metaphor on for size.

In my last post, I told the story of my carefully planned trip to Whole Foods, which turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, leaving me unable to check off my carefully conceived shopping list. To assuage my annoyance over the whole thing, I bought a book of Word Finders for the long wait for the bus, and the long bus ride. I hadn't done one since I was a preteen kid, or even thought of one until--ok, I do mention it--people at the Foie Gras Farm used them as distractions.

Where I grew up, these puzzles were/are called Word Searches, not Word Finds. I like the more positive attitude symbolized by calling them 'find' rather than 'seek'.
For no big surprise, I was good at Word Searches as a kid. It turns out I'm very good at Word Finds now. I complete one in less than five minutes. Even the number ones, where there aren't words to jump out at you, I can do pretty swiftly. There are some 'techniques' that I didn't even realize I had. As a kid, I knew that big words were easy to spot and that any word with double letters in it would be easy to find. I realize now that in addition to those pointers, when I was a kid I already knew not just to look for the initial letter of a word, but to look for any interesting juxtapositions of letters anywhere in the word, which is why I often start circling the word from its middle outward. 
This is a case of learning to recognize something from its interior parts, perhaps even from its ending, and not to be overly focused on the first impression, the first letter. You can know something from the inside and work outward from there.
But when I was a kid, I was sometimes impatient to 'know the answer'. As quickly as I found words, there would occasionally be a word that remained elusive. There was nothing in particular that these 'hiding' words had in common, but there were times they simply didn't appear to my eyes. I would go through the whole grid in a frustrated letter-to-letter search, and when I still didn't see it, I would go look at the solution in the back, to get over my irritation at not knowing the answer, to validate to myself that the word was actually in the grid, which I had come to doubt.
Of course, I'm still very impatient. Of course, there are still times when a word doesn't pop out for me. However, when I get to the stage of disbelieving that the word is even in the grid, I slow down. I check the instinct to go frantically looking. I don't even consider looking in the back, even if I've gotten to the point of thinking they forgot to put the word in the grid. I let my focus soften, circle all the other words that inevitably pop out at me when I'm stalking the hidden one. I trust it is there. I do the letter-to-letter search casually. I usually find the hider pretty soon; the slower I go, the sooner I find it. 
And the majority of the time, the hard-to-find word is going diagonally backward from the initial letter, either up or down. It seems to me there's a metaphor there, that when the tail is behind the head, it's a little harder to process. When I'm trying to be perfect before I even have my parts together, it's hard to see the whole picture. 
Perhaps this is the perspective someone needs on something in their life. Perhaps it's the perspective I need as I worry about what I'll be working on next year, doubt my abilities as a poet, and wonder whether I've learned anything. Perhaps, dare I say, it's a metaphor for recovery--a word I dislike. Perhaps I need to look backward and a little to the side to find a new word.