I’m six again, scribbling at the white, bleached space that fills the majority of the paper.
As always, I’m doing my best to keep it within the boundaries of the unwilling black lines, but with my young, pudgy hands and a lack of personal control, I manage to leave the tiniest marks of clover-green crayon escaping from its cell.
I throw the crayon down with all the strength I can muster, frustrated with my unpolished work. It’s only for a first-grade assignment about St. Patrick’s Day, but still, I want it to be extraordinary. I can feel my cheeks heating and my vision blurring, embarrassed that I can’t make it perfect.
Ten years later, I’m still in the same classroom, now with an upgraded set of Crayola Twistables and Ohuhu markers. Before me is a coloring book with designs of cute little bears, rabbits, and ducks having afternoon tea, washing a car, and making smoothies. It’s a futile attempt to expand my creativity in the face of graphite algebra equations and endless history notes. I want to challenge my perception of control and be willing to start drawing outside the lines.
However, as soon as I drop the Turquoise Ink Blue shade of marker on the line dictating whether I can allow my fingers to shake, I immediately swerve the shade inside the safe white space, where I know I won’t mess it up.
Inside these lines, I can take a breath, assured that within these boundaries, I’ll be able to control my actions, and no one will be able to dictate whether I want to shade the grass green or change the dynamic and make it orange.
This need for control translates over every part of my life, from group projects in school to choosing where my family wants to go on vacation next summer. It’s an uncompromising situation, stuck with wanting to reign command over every facet of my life and realizing that my opinion is not the only one that matters.
This concocted distress alerts a sense of panic in my head when something goes out of the ordinary, causing me to become overstimulated over nothing. When the dishes aren’t clean, when my study desk is cluttered with knick-knacks, when I’m crowded into an enclosed space with no breathing room, I feel as though I must burrow into hibernation like a groundhog and avoid the discordant jumbles of off-tune notes for as long as possible.
In these situations, I become convinced that it’s simply best to work alone: that way, I can ensure that the presentation will only be fumbled by my shaky voice instead of a partner not finishing a slide or that the phrases I write won’t be jeopardized by a rushed sentence from someone else.
Even so, I tend to become a victim of my mindset, overcommitting to something that could’ve easily been done and contributed to by multiple people. 10:30 p.m. bedtimes easily shift to 1 a.m., the pile of homework gets too arduous to handle, and my health is neglected in the meantime.
I’m back in the fluorescent-light classroom. I glance down to the coloring page. I’m almost finished—there’s just one more flower I have to meticulously shade in. I carefully color the stem and leaves an absinthe green, the pollen center yellow, and the petals a mauve purple. I’m on the last stroke of the marker when I, without thinking, jerk my hand to the right, filling the monotonous skyline with a stark flash of lightning. It’s electrifying, messy, and extemporaneous, but despite its unplanned arrival, it’s the most beautiful mark I’ve ever made on a coloring page.
