Tuesday was another day of art therapy—potentially my last, in fact, for reasons that I’ll explain in another post. Thus far, I’ve stuck with mostly geometric designs or tiny drawings on a corner of a piece of paper. A peer pointed out last week that I took up a little more space than I had in the past, and I decided for this session to use a whole page. I also decided to try to draw something living, another first for me in art therapy.
Our prompt was based on something I said during my first art therapy session, which I thought nicely bookended things. I said then that there were many times I felt like people were trying to put me in a box that didn’t fit. This week, we were to create something that showed boxes we didn’t fit in.
I thought first about how uncomfortable it feels when people try to assign labels that don’t work for me. I’m growing more comfortable, however, with rejecting those labels and taking up the space I need to. I thought then of how cats often sit in boxes they don’t fit in. They don’t seem to mind; if anything, they might enjoy the experience.
I have very little practice drawing animals without a model, so I looked online and found a picture of a cat in a box. I made some modifications—I added flaps to the box, and I put the tail outside instead of curled up in the box, but I kept the basic idea.
You may notice that the cat overflows the box, but it doesn’t seem particularly concerned about that. The cat is just itself, and I am just myself.
I then decided to add labels to this box, labels that people have thought fit me at one point or another. Some of those labels, people still believe about me. As I see it, however, these are all things that in some sense I have rejected or grown past, or that aren’t as true as they once were.
Do I need to be small and thin? I feel as though I should be, but I don’t want to feel that way. I want to be comfortable in my body, however it is.
I was young, precocious, advanced, remarkable, and smart—some even claimed that in a few areas, I was perfect. Perfection is a high standard to live up to, however, and it’s costly to attempt it. Better, perhaps, to embrace imperfections.
I still feel fragile, but I’m beginning to feel more comfortable with myself. Am I easily hurt? Absolutely! But do I need to be fragile so that people will be kinder to me, so they will treat me with respect? No. That never worked anyway, and even if it did, I’d rather be vulnerable but resilient than fragile.
I have come a long way, but I still have some things I can learn from this cat. How comfortable can I be breaking assumptions? What other labels can I discard?