Money tree: There are no rules to expression except those the expresser chooses to impose.
I was a doodler throughout my schooling. Each year I had a new notebook to make my academic marks, I made them in the margins in sketchy, dramatic lines of Ticonderoga graphite, and later and with less confidence, blue or black ink.
At some point I became conscious of this habit, at which time I developed a sudden and unsurpassable “doodler’s block,” where the consciousness of the act of doodling itself made doodling feel as difficult and unapproachable as notetaking. This devastating anti-breakthrough that made stress out of an activity that was meant to relieve it was established by one simple and deceivingly innocent question: what should I draw?
My therapist once told me to erase the word “should” from my vocabulary. I wish I had had Ashley there with me on that fatal elementary school morning to stop an overthinking disaster before it started, but here I was interrogating my doodling desires as aggressively as the next STAR quiz was going to interrogate my reading comprehension skills.
So, I copped out, crumpled under the imagined pressure that bedevils a blank page, or at least I felt like I did. I drew hearts. I always ended up drawing hearts. One big, fat heart whose lobes sloped into a merengue peak, one small and skinny heart like the kind my older sister scribbled on her mixtapes. Chains of hearts—yes, that right side up, upside down, right side up, etc. as straight across the page as I could.
I wasn’t even in love. They were all uninspired.
I wished I had had some vision that was so clear and developed that I could put my pen to the page and my hand would dance around in rhythm with it and create something that blew me away yet that I still recognized as my heart’s own. But I thought about it too much, I overthought, and so uninspired hearts it was.
Sometimes, sometimes I deviated to flowers. Shoot me.
Around the time my doodler’s block of self-imposed shoulds first came about, a classmate told me that you were never supposed to draw flowers with an even number of petals. I passively assumed that it was because even-numbered petal variations did not occur in nature. Thinking about it now, maybe they were superstitious that a symmetrical scribble could make their crush “love them not.” But I listened, and I finished off my daisies with a fat fifth petal if I had underestimated the amount of space my center circle offered instead of risking the forbidden uniformity of a sinful sixth. Another should abided by.
Then, a small revelation. The other day I noticed that my money tree’s leaves not only vary in their shades of green, but also in their number of leaves. Yes. Which, like petals of a flower, are governed by the Fibonacci sequence of numbers in nature, of which five is one and six is not. But on my money tree, some stems have five, and, lord be with me, some have the sinful sixth.
Assuming it is not carrying a synthetically imposed genetic mutation, which, now that I’m thinking about it, is probably more common in monoculture plant farming than I thought when I started writing this paragraph, my money tree comes from nature, and its expressions are, therefore, natural. There are not rules except those of evolution. It has five leaves, it has six leaves, and still, it thrives.
This made me realize how arbitrary imposed creative rules are. These rules that so inhibited the seeds of my inspiration have no logical or desirable root; therefore, reclaiming them as the creator is to use their arbitrary nature to aid the journey rather than allow it to run rampant and hinder, as the creative mind is want to do. Limits are necessary for me to focus my expressions, but now I am sure to check that they are arbitrary-desired, not arbitrary-imposed.
These philosophies I am working to internalize. I still falter and draw the unwanted yet “correct” five-petaled flower, and God knows I still face that mental creativity block every time I attempt to spit out an idea from my jumbled noggin onto paper, a Word doc, a canvas, a cast-iron skillet. But I am learning to let go of guilt and erase the word “should” from my creative vocabulary (I promise, Ashley, I’m doing my best), as it immediately implies an expectation, from myself or others, which is counterproductive to creating for enjoyment, self, beauty, love.
Hence, the inception of this blog—without expectations and for love. If you are here, thank you for being with me.
To reclaiming arbitrary rules and six-leaved money trees.