Doodling in the Margins

After my senior year of high school, my parents finally triumphed in their four-year campaign to make me clean my room. I’m not gross, or a slob. Just a hoarder who never threw away a single sheet of paper. By graduation, my slowly-growing mass of pages sprawled across the floor and under my bed, far beyond the pile that was born freshman year. All the pencil marks were smeared by time and friction, the edges ripping under shoe prints, the creases collecting dust.

I’ve always kept things because I could never feel sure they were useless. I thought that, years later, I would nostalgically relive every essay and equation. But while I dutifully boxed away the chronicle of my high school life, only the doodles caught my eye. They were everywhere. Gardens of little flowers creeping up the margins, eyeballs staring in rows between paragraphs, absurd comic strips interspersed with lecture notes. I couldn’t remember drawing any of them, but now I realized how many hours I must’ve spent. And how deliberately I forgot them.

Because doodles meant laziness and boredom. They were only allowed to inhabit the blank spaces. Overlooked when I flipped back to study old notes. Erased when I needed more room. They were separate, unimportant, a distraction from my real work.

That was a terrible realization to have while sitting on the newly bare floor of my bedroom, where I could remember scattering crayons at age four, stapling my first homemade picture book soon after, planning my future as an author-and-illustrator by middle school. Art had shaped and colored in my childhood, but by the end of high school, I’d confined it to the borders of my notebooks and the margins of my life.

And art meets the same fate in so many other lives. As kids, we’re all encouraged to be messy and imaginative. We produce an abundance of scribbled stick figures, gaudy pom-pom crafts, glitter-glued pipe cleaners. We make art with no need for purpose, no fear of judgment.

But at some point, everything shifts. In seeps an uneasy awareness of the other sets of eyes evaluating everything we create. The world starts telling us that we are no longer coloring, or crafting, or doing anything else for its own sake — now, there are grades, scores, prizes, and adults who praise and criticize. We, too, learn to watch with critical eyes, evaluating other people and ourselves. And many of us learn that, if we want to thrive and succeed, we need to be “good” at something — and avoid being “bad” at anything else.

Like all our other pursuits, art can be divided into “good” and “bad.” But art is overwhelmingly classified as something we’re “bad” at, because it is often misinterpreted as an innate talent, rather than a skill that can be honed with practice, such as school, music, or sports. And in a community as competitive and success-driven as Harvard, so many of us only make time for the things we believe we can improve upon or become “good” at. As a result, we’re pushed away by the idea that something like art requires unattainable talent, that we aren’t and will never be “good” enough at it to feel that longed-for euphoria of success and of standing out from others.

This misconception of art is exacerbated by the “starving artist” trope, which tells us that only a tiny elite is capable of securing financial stability through art, and that we are not part of it. We come to accept that making “bad” art not only brings us a sense of personal failure, but can drag us into economic ruin. And so art’s inherent riskiness constitutes yet another reason to drift away from it. At Harvard in particular, the “starving artist” trope is fueled by a culture that equates success with financial prosperity after graduation. As we watch our classmates pursuing lucrative finance and consulting jobs, or pursue them for ourselves, our priorities come under pressure. Time is a limited resource that must be spent productively, so we push to spend our time on profitable pursuits — things that we’re “good” at — since these alone provide a route to success.

It’s not like art was ever our one true calling. Not everyone who liked drawing as a kid should want to become a professional artist. We have so many other passions and things we’re “good” at, and each of us must figure out how to hone in on a particular path that fulfills us and leads to success. But as we grow up and those passions grow stronger, art becomes wrongfully sidelined.

The loss of art in our lives parallels countless other sacrifices we make to pursue our conceptions of success. At Harvard, many students never get enough sleep, don’t have the energy to take care of their mental and physical health, can’t find the time to be mindfully alone. We don’t make room in our schedules to go outside and exercise, to practice that instrument we played in high school, to read a book for pleasure. And we can’t squeeze art in, either.

Like so many other sacrificed things, art is incredibly important, even (and especially) when it is entirely unrelated to our primary interests. For the process of making art is inherently enriching, even when there’s nothing to be gained externally, and regardless of whether we’re “good” at it. Our imagination, storytelling, and awareness of the world around us flourish when we exercise our creativity. As kids, we had not yet learned to care if our art was “good” enough. And now that we’re growing up, we should once again recognize art’s true value, strive to always make more “bad” doodles, and consciously free them from the margins of our lives.

Isabella C. Aslarus ’21, a Crimson Design editor, lives in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.