One for the Creatives
I’ve always known that I would have a life lead by creativity. It’s in my DNA.
As a kid, I would thrive when it came to self expression via art class/creative activities. I even tried it with my personal style, but I went to a Catholic school until I was 14. Wearing black and white knee-high socks with bright red hearts at the top warranted a call-out-of-class visit by the principal—dress code violation *eye roll.
No nail polish, so that’s out the door. Earrings couldn’t dangle, so statement pieces weren’t a possibility. Couldn’t wear eye liner or any color other than red, white, black, and khaki (but, not like the cute kind of khaki).
You’d get written up if you violated the dress code too many times. Not talking from experience, of course…
So flexing that skill was saved for at home and Club Libby Lu. (P.S. Does anyone else remember this???) I wish I knew where that picture was of me posing in my long, fingerless zebra gloves before going to a friend’s birthday party at Libby Lu. Ah the simple times.
Art was my favorite class for as long as I can remember. It was an added bonus that my teacher, Mrs. Brown, was so f*cking cool. My memories in her classroom are as vivid as anything else—it was where I felt excited while at school.
Other classes were much less f*cking cool. Not cool at all, in fact.
But in an academic setting, art class is not a priority quite like math or science. Not to mention we had a science teacher who was a real-life of Snape and I am NOT MF kidding…
I get it, to an extent, but let’s not go down the rabbit hole of how the U.S. education system is f*cked.
What I’m getting at is that as a creative little bean, I felt like my interests and strengths weren’t legitimate. ‘Sure, art is fun, but you should go into the medical field—there’s more security there’ and ‘it’s incredibly hard to make a comfortable life with such a disadvantageous trade’ were things planted in my prepubescent brain.
When it came time to start making decisions about what I wanted to do with my life (like selecting a college major and seeking jobs that I actually wanted to do), I just knew I wanted to go down the path that was right for me, regardless of approvals or disapprovals, rather.
So, this one is for the creatives who have had their own journeys and relationships with going against the “safe” grain. For those who pursued a life, career, side-project, hobby of creating (art or other), especially if the road to getting there had 10x the amount of unwarranted warning signs that the other paths had.
I raise a glass to you. Nay…to us!
XO,
HMC