Monday Morning Love: Edition 2

I love building with LEGO

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This post has a ton of pictures, so your email client may have a freak-out. You may read it at the Substack website by clicking on the title above.

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Edition 2 of Monday Morning Love

This is my series for starting each week of on a note of positivity! I write about something I love and publish it first thing Monday Morning, in an attempt to start the week off on a positive note.

I’m not going to put these behind the paywall, but if it motivates anyone to become a paid subscriber, my student loan balance would appreciate dwindling a bit in your honor, and there’s a special deal at this link. Comments are open for paid subscribers. Feel free to weigh in on what’s most interesting to you out of the topics I’m thinking about right now, as things I love and that it might be fun to write about—number theory; the novel A Widow for One Year, by John Irving; riding a bicycle; coding; Halloween; learning to draw in colored pencils after having gotten to a reasonably high skill level in graphite; the novel The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver; learning to paint; finding unobtrusive ways to get more exercise in my day.

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Edition 2: I love LEGO

The LEGO company has been, for years, making construction toys. They manufacture all kinds of small, plastic bricks and other elements that can be combined to make almost anything.

In recent years, they’ve begun selling theme sets, which come with an instruction book and all the pieces to make objects related to an object or theme.

I love LEGO, and I find it to be incredibly therapeutic in a PTSD sense. That may sound very odd and even counter-intuitive, but I think I can justify my take.

Below, I will share my thoughts. But first, a photo album!

Some of the LEGO theme sets I’ve put together are pictured below, with captions or other descriptions.

This typewriter carriage moves when the keys are pressed.

A red pickup truck is such an American image, especially one with farming accoutrements. I really loved putting this set together. It has a carburetor under the hood, and I bought a lighting set to go with it.

Halloween!

Beautiful flowers, a mainstay of my home decor.

A Bonsai tree and a meditation garden.

An old-fashioned video game, with a Super Mario Brothers player that actually moves. Some reflections on the experience of building it here.

Christmas village!

Santa goes down the chimney….

….and pops out of the fireplace, underneath the stockings!

The three stacked beds are where elves sleep, then cook their waffles over the outdoor fire.

Elves checking Santa’s email and making toys.

A scene from “A Christmas Carol”.

Five heroes of STEM:

LEGO insects, a fairly new set:

And finally, Sesame Street, my newest set. I found this set to be wonderfully therapeutic, bringing back memories of childhood that were happy to reflect on, as well as a fun build. I wrote a bit about Sesame Street here, in a web-only edition.

Big Bird’s nest.

The headlines on the newspapers are fantastic.

Cookie Monster has a portrait of Count von Count on his wall!

The outdoor seating at the restaurant outside Mr. Hooper’s store.

Bert and Ernie’s shared apartment, including the rubber ducky.

Elmo’s bedroom, complete with goldfish, toy train, rocket, and pictures of Elmo with his daddy and his friends.

Bert and Ernie leaving after visiting Oscar the Grouch.

Elmo loves you!

Why Putting LEGO Together Is PTSD-Therapeutic

This is, obviously, one of my favorite hobbies. I have come to believe that it’s PTSD-therapeutic, by which I mean I think it is directly and specifically therapeutic for someone with PTSD issues and the corresponding jacked-up nervous system.

I have a couple of hypotheses about why it’s so therapeutic.

First, it feels creative, and it is in a sense. Obviously, there’s a sense in which it isn’t, especially these theme sets. They come with numbered bags and step-by-step instructions. But there is a sense in which it is absolutely a creative hobby. You start with raw materials and when you’re finished, you have a piece of something that’s arguably a piece of art. It’s something that’s colorful and interesting, brings joy, and provokes emotion—which makes it art-adjacent, at the very least. So I think it’s fair to say that putting together a LEGO set scratches a creative itch, of some sort.

This is PTSD-therapeutic because it’s life-affirming. Something exists, something pleasurable and enjoyable, that did not exist before. PTSD brains can always use some affirmation of life.

Second, it’s challenging. Not always, but often—some of the sets marketed at 18+ are in fact very challenging. The typewriter required me to start over from scratch several times, as I made small mistakes that quickly compounded. Meeting a challenge is always something I experience as affirming, in retrospect if not in the moment.

This is PTSD-therapeutic because it’s a type of challenge that helps increase frustration tolerance, and does so quickly. Starting over on a build after a mistake is starting over on something fun and that can be recovered fairly quickly, so it’s a type of instant gratification, in a very weird way.

Third, it requires basically zero maturity. There is no delayed gratification here, even on the sets that take thirty or forty hours. If I work on a build for an hour, when I walk away there is an hour’s worth of progress.

Things that are PTSD-therapeutic often require staggering amounts of trust, and in people, places, and things that can’t provide certainty. Something fun, challenging, and creative that gives an hour’s worth of progress for each hour’s worth of work provides benefits while requiring a minimal amount of trust, which is helpful. So much of PTSD-recovery is extremely hard work that finding one thing that helps me manage my disorder but is fun has been wonderful.

And that’s the final point for my argument that LEGO is a great PTSD-therapeutic hobby: it’s fun. Giving oneself permission to do something that’s purely and only fun is often hard for people, especially people who are troubled. It took me a long time to be able to give myself enthusiastic permission to do things that are just purely fun, but I can do it now. And I love it.

I love it very, very much.

I hope you enjoyed this dose of Monday Morning positivity. If you enjoy LEGO, registering at the LEGO website is a good idea. They’ll send you emails when fans submit ideas for new sets. As I understand the system, any set that gets 10,000 supporters (just a vote; you don’t have to provide a credit card or otherwise commit to buying it) gets manufactured. It’s great fun to have some input into what sets are coming next!

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