Doodle Waterfalls

 

My handwriting has always been messy.

Well, I say always – sometimes it was just

minuscule. Barely writing at all.

Like me, it hid, just hugging the lines

of my page, hardly raising.

Just a slight jump, a flickering kick

of a dance, before it would

dive back to safety. Hugging the line.

 

That was until I got told

it was a little too small.

Now overwrought, I overthought.

I put all of my attention

into making the

letters pop. I'd curve them

high up, then let

them

 

drop.

 

But they just resembled

scribbles, or inkblots, or periodically

characters from some alien space plot.

No amount of work

would make them sit still

like all of the other kids' words did.

 

Mine were wild, untamed.

They didn't so much write

as exclaim. They leapt like flame,

angry scratched veins of word slurry.

 

But no matter what I did,

I could never make them...

 

Neat.

 

And this troubled me, because

the words could be perfect

but the letters,

they made my words

look like me. Out of place.

Different. A freak.

 

So I always dreaded handing in my words.

 

But on the flip side, my folders

were doodle works of art,

coated in hours of

landmarks - a memory here,

a song lyric there,

a landscape of all my layers.

Faces, beasts,

hearts scrawled with names

that wouldn't know I was alive at all.

 

Hidden secrets...

 

Not so hidden when you had to

hand them to teacher.

 

And the margins were

stretched out, sketchy waterfalls

of doodles and thought.

A draft work

of fluid art.

Monuments to what

I didn't know back then...

 

Who I was...

 

A child with ADHD.

 

I needed to constantly be moving.

Always letting my pen flow

where it needed, bleeding all

of my thoughts in ink to the sky,

and I seeded

those pages with so many

mini-masterpieces,

they could have held

an exhibition in my name.

 

But alas, I just got told to stop.

 

Not "use a blank piece of paper,"

not "is there something troubling you."

 

Just stop.

 

If you put as much effort

into your work as you

do daydreaming...

 

Never allowing the true child to bloom,

instead growing a weed in a darkened room.

 

But here's the thing. I passed all of the exams,

higher grades than all in my school, because

the doodles were a learning tool.

Relaxing me into listening.

 

Now when I write it flows out like music,

still not pretty, most definitely

not neat, but it moves

in rhythm to my internal beat.