Taboo

When I was in kindergarten, our assignment in art class on some particular day was to “draw something beautiful.” Pretty standard stuff for that age. I drew (to the best of my meager ability) an angel.

This wouldn’t be notable in any way except for the fact that I got in some trouble for it. The teachers were touchy about religious stuff in school, and suggested that I draw something else. I was pretty stubborn and didn’t want to draw something else, and apparently, I put up enough of a stink about it that my father got called.

He came to the school for the ensuing parent-teacher conference and made it quite clear that he was not in agreement with the school’s position. The teachers said they were worried about making other kids uncomfortable if they either weren’t religious or maybe had other religious beliefs, which my father – rightly – pointed out was absolutely absurd. One kid drawing an angel for himself wasn’t an affront to any other five-year-old’s beliefs. Since I couldn’t name a single other thing anyone else drew, it was absurd to imagine that anyone else would even know what I’d scrawled on a piece of paper unless someone raised a whole stink about it.

The point my father was making, which was correct then and is correct now, is that your own self-expression is never impolite. No one else is forced to even look at your stuff, let alone grapple with the deeper implications of it. There is plenty out there that can be considered taboo; stuff you don’t throw at others unless they’ve agreed to step into that sphere with you. But taboo cannot exist between you and the page.

When you draw something, write something, even say something in no one’s company but your own, that’s nothing more than an external hard drive to your mind. It’s no one’s business, even if you’re doing it somewhere that someone else could conceivably be exposed to it. It still isn’t an attack, and is never harmful to others.