On Nov. 5, 2020, I purchased The Raconteur Puzzle from the New York Public Library. It’s a 1,000-piece puzzle illustrated by Australian artist Ilya Milstein and it depicts a colorful scene of friends gathering, drinking wine, and generally living their best lives. It was a scene I’d often found myself in with friends before the pandemic and one I was longing to recreate once it was safe to do so.

Like many people, I entered the pandemic with grand hopes and aspirations of picking up a hobby with my newfound free time. I still remember the first night my husband and I attempted to do the puzzle together–we’d bought wine, I had a Spotify dinner jazz playlist playing in the background. Fast forward nearly two years later and that puzzle remains unfinished.

While most people find puzzling to be peaceful, my highly ambitious (thus, 1,000-piece count) and overachieving self found the experience to be stressful and overwhelming. I had dreams of completing the puzzle over the course of a couple of days, maybe a week. But as weeks stretched into months and it came time to pack up our Chicago condo to move to Ohio, my desire to become a person who puzzles vanished with it.

Recently, however, I decided to give puzzling another go. This time as part of a virtual puzzle and sip hosted by The Self Care Suite featuring RVL Wellness Co, a Black woman-owned jigsaw puzzle company. Finally, I’d found my people.

As my husband prepped my cocktail (bee’s knees, thank you) and took our daughter for a walk so I could puzzle in peace, I enjoyed the conversation we were having about our connection to puzzling. Many of the women mentioned how they’d taken up puzzling as a hobby following in the footsteps of their grandmothers and aunts.

In fact, it’s how Brittny Horne, founder of RVL Wellness Co. got into puzzling.

“I started puzzling whenI was a kid with my grandmother. She was the person who introduced me to them and at some point, it became this thing I associated with her,” Horne shares. “She puzzles throughout the day and has her own room dedicated to puzzling. But as I got older, I didn’t really pay too much attention to puzzles.”

And then the pandemic happened. One puzzlemaker saw sales increase 370% year over year during March 2020–a trend comparable to the demand for puzzles during the Great Depression, according to puzzle historian Anne Williams.

“It’s something you can control, whereas they felt that their lives were totally out of control as far as the economy went,” Williams told CNBC in 2020. “It’s also a challenge over which you can prevail.”