Schooling vs. Self-Discovery: The Battle for Creative Expression

When I was in school, I hated writing. And when I left school and became a homeschooler at the beginning of Year 4, I hated it even more. If you had told me from the age of 7 up until 15, that I would now be spending each day teaching myself how to make a career through my writing, I would’ve laughed it off.

The fact is, school killed my creativity. For years, I had this warped belief of writing and what you had to do to be a good writer. I distinctly remember being told to write several pages, at the age of seven, about a subject I had no interest in. I struggled to finish two pages, let alone the four I had been asked to. I was taught that to learn poetry, I had to print off a poem each week and glue it into a book that I had decorated. Then, I would stand in front of my classmates and recite my poem, a nightmarish situation even now.

It’s only been recently, the past few weeks actually, that my dislike of poetry, is a result of the lack of creative interaction I experienced during literacy instruction. I turned to Mum in the car only last week and said this to her:

“Mum, I think my harsh judgment about stuff like poetry is because that’s what I learnt in school.”

In school, I had learned that poetry could only be done a certain way, about certain topics, or certain genres and if it wasn’t, then my writing wasn’t good enough. So try again.

This belief had attached itself like a parasite to all other forms of art that I tried to pursue after school as well. My writing wasn’t good enough, I couldn’t draw very well, my painting was subpar at best and god forbid I try to craft something without guidelines or instructions on how to do it first. My self-doubt ruled over me for years, dictating everything that I tried to learn, and how I was able to learn it.

It’s taken me years to become comfortable with even just family reading any personal writing that I do. I remember the first time I decided to see what would happen if I left some of my writing out, wanting to test the waters of my parents’ reactions rather than proudly show them what I had crafted. I had left one of my notebooks that I had spent the previous night writing a story in, out on the kitchen bench. Just off to the side, but open on one of the pages that I had poured my heart onto.

When Mum asked me about it, I was genuinely surprised to hear that she thought it was good. As if I was expecting criticism from her like I had heard from my teachers previously, about how that sentence wasn’t structured properly, or how I should try and rewrite it a little better. Instead, I just nodded, said thanks and took the book back into my room. That night, I wrote several more pages before going to sleep.

Because of those years, I often wonder what it would’ve been like if I had been encouraged sooner, to learn with my heart, rather than taught to think with my head. Would I have started writing again sooner? Probably. Would I have ever stopped writing, too afraid that whatever I put on the page wasn’t good enough for a first draft? Probably not. It’s still something I struggle with, admittedly.

I don’t think that I could ever blame my teachers for how my relationship with creativity declined so rapidly through my short school years. I know now more than ever, that they were teaching writing the way they had been taught to teach it. But I also can’t get back the years that I spent huddled with my notepad and a torch in bed, writing while I should have been sleeping so that I wouldn’t get caught. Because, for so long, I believed that my passion and love for writing was something to be embarrassed about and that how I wrote was ‘wrong’, because it didn’t look like the writing expected of me at school. 

My creativity is the most important thing to me now. It’s something that I’m actively learning how to adapt into an income source, a lifestyle and a general practice through each day. When I relearned how to l write through my heart, everything clicked back into place, and I felt the pure unbridled joy I used to feel as a kid whenever I wrote for myself. It’s something that I wish I had nurtured and encouraged in school, rather than writing being presented as a methodical, mechanical skill instead. 

If I had been encouraged to fail in everything that I tried, then I would’ve felt less fear, if any, whenever it came to learning something new. Or learning to grow an already, seemingly innate skill. Instead, I had spent many years believing that above all else, I could not fail at this, because if I failed then I was not good enough at it to keep trying until I got it right.

If I had been encouraged to write about the things that I was passionate about, from the adventures I sent my stuffed animals on, to the wildlife around the world, my love for writing may not have been locked away for so long. Instead of my writing being ‘directed’ and ‘marked’ as correct or wrong, it would have been so much more valuable to me if I had been assisted in learning to craft and refine my ideas instead. Learning about the process of writing, the continuous cycle of crafting, editing, and reshaping… all to end up with a final product? Looking back on it now, that would have launched my already growing passion for writing further than I would’ve even been able to anticipate, such as it is doing now.