I am an art teacher with a master’s degree—trained by brilliant professors who believed that art could do more than decorate walls. I offer safe spaces for teenagers to grow—nourishing soil where their imaginations can take root.
And yet… I am assigned to hallway duty.
This is compulsory education, after all.
So I sit—posted like a sentinel—watching young lives stream past.
“Get to class,” I say with a smile and a nudge.
The system wants attendance; I’m hungry for presence.
Armed not with a whistle or clipboard, but with a pen—
my scribble’s soft insurgency.
The hallway stretches out like a geometric hymn.
Columns and corners chant structure.
Teenagers swirl past—half-formed galaxies of limbs and laughter—
their orbits chaotic, their gravity pulling time forward.
I begin to draw.
Not their tardiness, but their motion.
A shoulder. A blur of sneakers.
A tilted head chasing freedom.
Feet flickering like seconds.
Each mark a pulse.
Each smudge a breath.
My paper becomes a seismograph of seeing—
trembling gently through the mundane.
This isn’t about making art for a frame or a feed.
It’s about refusing to leak away in the fluorescent hum of obligation.
It’s a quiet mutiny against the clock.
I do this on long car rides, too (passenger side, mind you).
Letting the lines grow wild, jagged, and unapologetic.
Not for polish—
but for presence.
This is how I remember I’m still alive.
Still growing.
Still watching.
Still choosing to see.
Because sometimes mental health looks like
a piece of scrap paper,
a moving pen,
and the simple, sacred act of
marking time with wonder.
Driven by my mishearing of something Dr. David Scheel was talking about regarding the octopus Heidi he kept in his home for a yearlong period...
His documentary ‘Octopus: Making Contact’ is a lovely thing worth watching I should add!
...To step into your shoes and walk out the door, leaving the comfort of your cocoon.
Into the world again, after long to interact with people face to face.
To realise you can’t, turn around and run away.
I think, I have become insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Many years back, I watched that documentary ‘The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off’ about a fellow called Jonny Kennedy who lived with the skin condition EB. There’s a bit in that film where he talks about what he hopes his afterlife would be like and, for whatever reason, a couple of coffees as I was re-reading the Wikipedia article about it triggered an idea I had to scribble down...
Some folks in this world tend to get a kick out of their more negative impulses and for all sorts of trivial reasons. Had to crank out something in response to my thoughts on the matter here! On a lighter note, any excuse to draw an irrawaddy dolphin is a good one...:)
