Charlotte Jons is a first-year journalism major and writes “The Peanut Gallery” for the Daily News. Her views do not necessarily reflect those of the newspaper.
It’s 2015 and my mother calls my name from the kitchen with dinner on the table. From my bedroom upstairs, I hear her and sit at a desk, eyes jumping rapidly around the paper in front of me.
The sides of my hands are stained and a technicolor rainbow of washable marker is displayed on my skin. There is Crayola under my nails and the room is scented of Sharpie markers. I yell downstairs: ‘Five more minutes!’ as I hover my hand over pencil cases, searching for just the right shade of blue to add to my masterpiece.
In nine years, instead of a sheet of paper covered in art supplies, I now sit at my dorm room desk, staring over an assignment due at 11:59 p.m. with clean hands and a room clear of marker smell.
Growing up and away from a childhood passion is one of those unstoppable and often disappointing realities we are forced to confront as we add candles to our yearly birthday cakes. We all have a hobby or club we practiced up until middle or high school before abandoning it for educational practicality. In many cases, this is something like a sport we never entirely enjoyed or a time commitment we always dreaded attending.
Sadly contrasting from those cases, these abandoned passions are not always something we were hoping to lose. And unfortunately, for a lot of us, this hobby we give up for more realistic endeavors is often related to the arts we adored as a child.
I noticed this in myself, especially after moving into college for my freshman year.
As a journalism and honors student — and an extremely involved participant of many extracurriculars and student organizations on campus — I have kept myself unorthodoxly busy my first three months as a Ball State University student.
This is nothing new for me personally, but it still felt newly emotional. While living on my own and caring for myself and my education fairly independently, I felt a great connection with my younger self who always dreamed of working toward a higher education within this field.
While I do believe she would be extremely thrilled by the papers I have been cranking out for perfect grades, I do think my first-grade self would feel a little saddened by the lack of cardstock paper or stickers in the dorm room I come home to every day.
After finding myself repeatedly tying my love of design and creativity into my written work for classes to give myself that creative kick, I started to question why those physical arts I adored as a toddler got traded in for heavy reading on my laptop.
I became curious if I was the only one feeling detached from my creativity as I aged and began asking those around me for their thoughts. From other Daily News reporters and editors to my family and friends on and off campus, everyone became involved in this new conversation.
The responses I got were, for me, both validating and strikingly consistent.
When I asked them if they participated in creative activities before they were teens, the majority of my peers said yes, with the main two forms of arts they enjoyed being drawing and crafts. In contrast, when I asked if they still participated in those arts they loved from their younger age group, only half said yes.
Nearly everyone I asked mentioned doing art that they still enjoy less frequently than they did as a child. Almost everyone told me they wished they had more time in their lives for art.
This made me sad, then angry. How was it possible, I wondered, that so many child artists like myself lost an entire passion that was a part of themselves for so long?
It felt like such a deep injustice that this had happened over and over again to so many people.
The University of Florida (UF) as well as a 2019 Huston Public Schools-based study researched the deep connection between education and many forms of the creative arts.
According to UF, those “who participated in arts education see the following benefits: Improved writing achievement, reduced disciplinary infractions, more student engagement, improved college aspirations [and] no drop in standardized test scores.”
This list of benefits makes it easy to understand why the arts are so implemented in our kindergarten classrooms. However, this begs the question: Why aren’t older honors students typically encouraged to pursue similar creative methods of learning?
If we have such a large collection of research highlighting a connection between the arts and educational and individual success — why are we not making more art?
The answer is hard to pinpoint. A part of this ties directly into one’s need to be exceptional.
Magazine Backstage.com published an article titled “When Did We Stop Being Artists?” by Erin Cronican. It reads, “At an early stage, a child singing out of tune is adorable, at another point, the child is hushed and told not to sing. Children and adults, alike, stop painting pictures because they tell themselves, ‘I’m not good at it’ and forget that creating art is about expression, not about excellence.”
The mentality of “practice makes perfect” is so drilled into our heads as we age that, when the time comes, the practice just takes too long. Perfection becomes the only correct output of creative pursuits, and we start to see the practice of our arts as pointless altogether.
With age, the creation of art becomes both externally moronic — with the public around us telling us to stop creating despite its benefits — and internally pointless — through us beginning to believe the public is correct.
So, for the most part, we grow up and stop making art.
I kept on with the conversations among my peers, asking everyone I knew what their continued thoughts were on something I had become so passionate about seemingly overnight.
“In what new, ‘grown-up’ ways do you show your artistic or creative side at your current age?”
Instead of the pessimistic answers of lost art participation that I was expecting, the responses I began receiving were very inspirational: Social media, scrapbooking, writing screenplays and making videos, knitting, colorful makeup, using watercolors with my mom, and more.
I found myself scrolling through a massive list of creative activities and quotes, including the ones above, that I had collected, each individual and unique to their user, that allow a person to connect with their childhood artist.
For me personally, I have become extremely creative within my social media, specifically on my Instagram in the last year. Getting to follow trends, share events in my life, and create story posts by moving pictures and selecting text has become my own digital scrapbook.
I also write music, which is an art form despite my mind discounting it from my creative resume due to its lack of glitter glue or markers. I enjoy making people gifts and cards as well. I love painting when I have the time to play around with my watercolor pallets.
The more I sat with myself and considered all the ways I still show my creativity, I discovered that for me, no art or passion for it was lost — it grew up with me.
And this was certainly the case for the majority of my peers who let me know just how much their personal creativity is persevering in their lives against those around them who were trying to remove it.
In the future, I will be sure to notice my pessimism related to the lack of constant imagination and creation when it spirals and refocus it into joy for the creativity I do still have, that did not vanish from my body as I started to grow. And I encourage you to do the same.
There is certainly a lot of debate about the importance of art creation in our modern world and I am happy to report that I will be working together with my childhood self to push back against the argument of academics and our creative pleasure.
If you disagree or tell me to stop, you will be fighting against the version of me at a bedroom desk at age 9 — the version with marker-tinted forearms and glitter glue fingers.
She will tell you to pick up a brush with her and start painting.
Contact Charlotte Jons via email charlotte.jons@bsu.edu.
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