Sometimes You Need to Draw Your Own Lines
Finding my way through a life of colourful chaos
“You’re doing it wrong.”
Lucy only needed the briefest glance at my dot-to-dot art sheet to make her assessment.
It was only my first week of school, but it was not the first time I’d been informed that I was doing something wrong by one of my classmates. Lucy was particularly attuned to my general wrongness.
She may have been a fellow six-year-old as new to the ways of big kid school as me — yet, she knew these things.
Lucy lived in a binary world. Good and bad, right and wrong, black and white. She was able to identify what was what with remarkable efficiency.
Lucy was, in every way, a colour-inside-the-lines kind of kid.
My world was less binary and more a chaotic tangle of changing parameters. From my mother I learnt the art of justification, my father taught me to look for loopholes, and my brothers taught me that many things in life came down to being able to gauge whether or not someone was going to care.
I did not come from a world where you could do art wrong. I did, however, recognise the level of authority and matter-of-fact tone in Lucy’s statement.