Bees and Puzzles: The Story
I’ve always been drawn to creatures that expose the limits of our understanding.
Bees are one of them. In the past, there was a widely circulated claim that, based on human calculations of aerodynamics, bees should not be able to fly. The claim has since been corrected, but what remains interesting is not the error itself, but what it reveals. That the problem was never the bee. It was the model.
The framework failed to account for the actual mechanics of how bees move. The rotation of their wings. The way they generate the lift. And the fact that they do not operate within the simplified assumptions imposed on them. In other words, bees were never defying physics. They were operating within a reality that human understanding had not fully grasped yet.
I got a tattoo of a bee under my left ear on my 23rd birthday, a few weeks before graduating from college. What I was drawn to was not the myth of defiance, but the recognition that systems, no matter how structured or widely accepted, can be incomplete. That something can make sense in itself and still appear contradictory when viewed through the wrong lens.
Bees carried something very personal for me. They were a reminder that the laws people live by are also constructed. Like how success should look, how life should unfold, or what counts as progress. They feel fixed only because we were conditioned to believe in them through countless, conscious and unconscious repetitions. But like the flawed models used to explain the bees, they are not always equipped to hold every kind of experience. The bee for me became a critique and a permission. That I could move in ways that do not always align with those expectations. And that misalignment does not automatically mean I am doing something wrong.
I am stubborn, I guess that’s a given. I’ve lived the tension of living inside frameworks that do not fully account for people’s experiences. I often scrutinize whether the inconsistency lies in us or in the structure being used to interpret us. The bee, for me, resolved that tension by insisting that structure itself can be revised.
The puzzle under my right ear came later, after I finished my thesis.
If the bee represents the limits of existing frameworks, the puzzle represents my attempt to construct one that can hold what those frameworks could not.
My thesis centered on Adverse Childhood Experiences, which, at its core, traces patterns of how early environments shape later outcomes, how behaviors that seem isolated are often part of larger, interconnected systems, and how communities can sometimes become hotspots of these experiences. The psychodynamic perspective may explain my thesis as influenced by my childhood experiences, but Allport’s functional autonomy would argue that the work becomes its own reason. What may have begun as something rooted in the past has since become its own motive. My interest in understanding these patterns is not only a way of reexamining my own history, but also to understand how to change patterns that wound generations.
There is a difference between feeling something and understanding its structure. My experiences used to exist mostly as fragments of memories, reactions, or impressions that did not fully connect to each other. Through the lens of my research, those fragments began to take form as patterns. Fragments that are no longer random, but can be located, traced, explained, and, to some extent, disrupted.
My research may not have changed what happened, nor did it heal my emotional wounds in a conventional sense. But it changed the conditions under which I look at it. It allowed me to look at my parents not only as people who made certain choices, but as individuals shaped by their contexts, limitations, and histories. Finishing it felt like placing a piece somewhere in my heart that had always felt hollow. It was not the final piece, but it was the one that showed that there was, in fact, a picture.
The name bees and puzzles comes from that intersection.
There is the recognition that not everything fits within the frameworks we are given. But there is also the effort to keep trying to understand things. To sit with what does not immediately make sense.
Bees, in reality, are not defying anything. They move according to principles that are simply more complex or different from what the earlier models could explain. They function with a structure that differs from ours, and our lack of understanding of that difference does not make them any less. If anything, that made them who they are.
Puzzles work in a similar way. I know this because I was a sucker for solving puzzles since I was seven. Every piece belongs somewhere, but that belonging is not always immediately visible. We do not solve it all at once. We try, we adjust, we leave pieces aside, and sometimes understanding only comes when enough of the surrounding parts are already in place.
This blog exists somewhere between the polar ends of my history. Between my stubbornness to not instantly accept beliefs and my obsession with understanding them. It is where I try to make sense of my reality without forcing it into explanations that do not fit. Where I allow things to remain incomplete while still believing they can, eventually, be understood.
This is where I learn how to move, sometimes against the structure, to piece my puzzles.