You Are Doing It Wrong

I don't remember when I stopped drawing on the walls. I remember doing it once. Between five and fifteen, that confidence went missing. It leaked out, slowly, through a hundred small corrections.

‘Hold the pencil like this.’ ‘Colour inside the lines.’ ‘That's not what a tree looks like.’ ‘Stop daydreaming and finish your worksheet.’

I think about this quite often, because it isn't really about the art. It's about permission. It's about the freedom to be.

Every child walks into the world assuming they're allowed to make things, say strange things, imagine impossible things, without asking anyone first. Growing up, in most places, is the slow process of that permission being revoked.

I remember a school notebook I filled with a comic strip about a soldier and his gun. It was a small, funny thing, drawn in the margins of an assignment. A teacher found it, and what came back wasn't laughter. It was a lecture on wasting paper, wasting time, and wasting attention that was on the syllabus. I wasn't punished exactly. I was corrected and redirected towards the version that was easier to grade. I finished the assignment properly. I stopped drawing in the margins. It took years before I let myself make anything again, and by then, "making things" had silently turned into "producing work", which is a different, warier activity altogether.

That's the pattern, I think, for most of us.

Not a single crushing event, but a long accumulation of small, well-meant corrections, each one reasonable on its own, each one filing down a little more of the strangeness that made the work ours in the first place.

Society teaches early and efficiently. A child who draws a purple sky is told to draw it blue. A student who wants to study something impractical is reminded that there are bills to pay. An adult who chooses an unfamiliar life is asked when they plan to become serious.

The vocabulary changes. The instruction doesn't. ‘You are doing it wrong.’

It is rarely said that directly anymore. There are gentler ways of saying the same thing.

‘Be practical.’ ‘Think about your future.’ ‘What will people say?’ ‘Is that really a career?’ ‘You could do something more useful.’ ‘You don't want to make things difficult for yourself.’ ‘Don't waste your potential.’

Some of this is good advice. That's what makes it effective. Control rarely arrives announcing itself as control. It arrives dressed as concern.

The people who love you most are often the ones administering this lesson, because they're afraid. Fear dressed as guidance is still fear, and it still narrows what you'll risk saying out loud.

Where art is treated as decoration rather than dissent-in-waiting, it is tolerated exactly as far as it stays decorative. Curricula built for compliant citizens rather than curious ones don't need to ban imagination outright. They simply never make room for it. And a thing with no room to stand in disappears just as completely as a thing that's forbidden. A generation raised to fill in the correct answer is not necessarily a generation raised to ask why the question was asked at all.

The system — school, work, the whole machinery we're fed into — fails in a more mundane way. It was built to produce predictable outcomes from unpredictable people, and predictability has never had much use for a child who wants to know why the clouds can't be green.

We are told how to build careers, how to dress, how to speak, what success should look like, what a productive morning looks like, what a healthy body looks like, what a respectable life looks like.

Even rebellion now comes with templates. There is a correct way to be unconventional.

There is a correct aesthetic for being different. A correct way to be politically aware. A correct way to be creative. A correct way to turn your hobbies into income. A correct way to turn your grief into a story and your story into a personal brand.

We have become remarkably good at converting even our attempts to escape conformity into another set of instructions. Social media makes this especially absurd. We scroll through thousands of carefully arranged lives and then wonder why our own feels unfinished. We watch people turn reading into a personality, exercise into an identity, travel into evidence of having lived, and creativity into content.

Even leisure has become something to perform correctly. Read the right books. Go to the right places. Have the right opinions about them. Photograph the right meal. Optimise your morning. Monetise the thing you once did because you loved it.

And then we wonder why so many people feel as though they are failing at being alive. The same adults who tell children to be practical will, in the next breath, mourn how little wonder is left in the world. The same institutions that grade the play out of childhood will later pay consultants to teach "creative thinking" to the employees they trained out of it.

We ask children to grow up quickly and then spend our thirties trying to get some of that childishness back in yoga retreats, journaling apps, weekend pottery classes, and expensive workshops on creativity. We try to rebuy what was given away for free and taken without much ceremony.

We spend years teaching people to stop being strange, then spend enormous amounts of money trying to teach them to think differently.

Maybe that's the real problem. Not that we lose the ability to make art. What we lose is the nerve, the willingness to make something a little strange, a little wrong, a little too much ours, and put it in front of someone anyway.

Eventually the teacher doesn't have to tell us the drawing is wrong. We learn to do it ourselves.

We delete the sentence before anyone can dislike it. We abandon the painting before anyone can call it ugly. We choose the safer career before anyone can call us foolish. We soften the opinion before anyone can disagree. We don't write the story because someone might think it is embarrassing. The correction moves inside.

That may be the most efficient form of conformity: when nobody has to police you because you have learned to police yourself.

I don't think the answer is some grand return to childhood. I think the answer is smaller.

A doodle in a margin somewhere. A sky coloured according to your mood. A painting nobody commissioned. A sentence written the way it actually sounded in your head before you tidied it up for anyone else's approval. A fabricated story that appeared in your head when you saw a child running after an ice cream truck. A career decision that makes sense only to you. An opinion you haven't rehearsed for an audience. A strange idea you haven't yet figured out how to defend.

Not a rebellion. Just a small, stubborn refusal to keep correcting yourself out of existence.