Boundaries
As a child you are brought up in a world filled with boundaries and limitations. From the day you are born you are taught right from wrong. As long as you follow the rules you'll be fine. However if you were to say the grass is blue and the sky is green, you are automatically thought of, as to be crazy and delusional. Anything remotely different or outside of the box is wrong.

It wasn’t until third grade that I finally realized just how chained down everyone’s thoughts and imaginations were. It was that particular day in my childhood where everything changed for me. Mrs. Thornton, like all my previous teachers thought it would be a perfect day to draw self portraits. You would think that after so many years in school of drawing some silly pictures of ourselves that we would know just how to do it, but no, Mrs. Thornton felt the need to gives everyone rules and guidelines for the drawings.

“Alright class for the self portraits I have a few simple instructions for you all to follow. The first thing you have to do is make things look realistic. I do not want a random unicorn in the background. You have to draw things that are real like, flowers, trees, and all that good stuff.”


I roll my eyes and face the opposite direction of my teacher.Why do we even have to draw "real stuff?" What's wrong with me wanting to draw a mermaid?
I never really did care for what Mrs. Thornton had to say either way.


"As for rule number two," Mrs. Thornton continues, "I want to see a lot of cheerful colors like, orange, yellow, and light blues. I don't really like sad colors like, black.



I let out a loud sigh at the mention of that, and some people turn their heads to look at me. Are you kidding me? Suddenly, dark colors are sad. Who ever came up with that? Who declared that black was a sad color? I have to bite my lip to keep the words from spilling out.


" Finally," Mrs. Thornton says, " I know we are running low on this color, but when you draw your self portrait, make sure to use the skin color crayon."


Mrs. Thornton then pulls out a very light colored crayon, also known as, apricot.


I thought of all my previous years I have had with other teachers and I realized that they all referred to apricot, as the skin colored crayon. When last time I checked, we're all different skin colors. My dark skin looks nothing like Mrs. Thornton's pale almost ghost like skin. While my other classmates differ in different shades.


It finally hit me. Never has anybody ever questioned what we're taught in life. When some words are spoken by someone older than us, we automatically take in the information and consider it as right, and that's how we lose our creativity. Overtime we step out of our outside thinking and get used to what we're taught.


Instead of saying anything to Mrs. Thornton I ran to my seat and began working on my masterpiece. I filled the page with majestical creatures, a blend of dark and bright colors, and I got my brown crayon to fill in my skin.