Childhood Creative Endeavors #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter C post in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I initially wanted to write about cardmaking, but I don’t feel like that now. Instead, I’m going to talk about my creative endeavors as a child.

As a young child, I had a bit of useable vision that allowed me to use colors sort of appropriately (that is, as appropriately as a sighted child my age could). I loved learning about the names of unusual colors. I remember, in particular, learning that the sixth color of the rainbow is indigo, which I was fascinated by.

I could do some basic drawing too. In Kindergarten, I went to mainstream school with hardly any accommodations. I remember having to color inside the lines of a piece of paper, giving each little shape within the drawing a different color and not leaving any white. When, several years later, I looked at it, I saw considerable white. I have no idea how I compared to the other kids though.

By the age of eight, I’d lost the ability to tell most shades of green and blue apart, but I continued to love drawing until I was about age twelve. Then, I realized I’d lost so much vision that it’d make no sense. Even so, before then, my drawings up till that age remained comparable to a Kindergartner’s in quality.

When I went to special education, I was taught other creative activities. I remember making at least a dozen origami frogs in second grade. However, my teacher did at one point write on my report card that she wished she were two teachers so that she could teach together. In other words, I required so much attention that she’d really need to split herself in half to be able to teach the class too.

My parents bought a pottery kiln when I was about eleven, so I also tried my hand at ceramics. I wasn’t too good at it, leaving fingerprints on my work all the time, but at least I enjoyed the process.

Writing also was a lifelong passion of mine. I can’t, in fact, remember a time when I didn’t enjoy writing. At first, I’d make up stories to go along with my drawings. As a tween and teen, I wrote stories that were somewhat or very much related to my real life. My greatest achievement is a work in progress, a young adult novel by the working title of “The Black Queen” about a teen whose mother has multiple sclerosis. This story, though it had autobiographical elements, was inspired by a conversation I overheard about a classmate.

Did you love creative activities as a child?

32 thoughts on “Childhood Creative Endeavors #AtoZChallenge”

    1. Thanks for sharing. It’s too bad we didn’t have a writing club at my schools. Well, we had the school newspaper, of course, but I never did anything for that.

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    1. I’m so happy you don’t feel regret about not having made a drawing in a long while and not having become a graphic designer. Isn’t it interesting what our family thinks we could/should become as we grow up? My father thought I’d become a mathematician. Well, though I’m quite good with arithmetic, higher level math is very different.

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        1. It definitely is! And at least I didn’t end up becoming what anyone, including myself, wanted me to become. Oh well, I’m a writer in a sense (as in, a blogger), which is what I wanted to be for most of my life.

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            1. Thank you so much! I am very lucky, in that I am on disability benefits so don’t have to work. Not that I can, but my parents thought back when I was growing up that I could and I too usually thought that I could or at least should.

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