What School Got Wrong About You
The Disruptive Act of Coming Home to Yourself
This reflection is a companion to podcast episode: "Art for self: Creativity as Recovery, Resource & Reclamation”
There's something almost laughably ironic about the fact that I teach people how to "scribble in books" for a living.
And by ‘for a living’, I don’t mean that I teach it as a way for you to make money from it.
I mean that I teach it as a way of living.
As a way of coming home to yourself when you've been lost, silenced, or forgotten in the noise of what everyone else needs you to be.
The irony is bittersweet to me because thirty-something years ago, I was the teenager getting in trouble for doing exactly this.
Doodling in my textbooks. Letting my pen wander across margins while my mind tried to stay tethered to lessons that felt like they were happening to someone else.
I was the "disruptive" student whose hands needed to move in order for her brain to stay present, whose creativity leaked out in unauthorised spaces because there were no authorised ones.
My teachers saw distraction. I was just trying to regulate.
They saw defiance. I was just being myself.
And somewhere in that disconnect, I learned that the very thing that helped me exist in my own skin was wrong. That my instinct to create, to move, to process the world through my hands was not valuable.
Not worthy of space or time or understanding.
So I learned to hide it. To apologise for it. To believe that if I couldn't sit still and absorb information the way everyone else seemed to, something was fundamentally broken about me.
The Long Way Home
It took decades and a recovery journey that demands I excavate every buried part of myself, to understand what I had lost in those early years of correction.
Not just the doodling, but the trust in my own instincts. The belief that my particular way of moving through the world had value.
I left school with no direction, no sense of what I wanted to do, no understanding that the thing I'd been scolded for was actually a profound gift. A way of thinking, processing and problem solving that could serve not just me, but others who had been similarly misunderstood.
The path back wasn't linear. It rarely is.
But creativity, that same impulse that got me in trouble as a child, became the breadcrumb trail that led me home to myself.
When I first began, at probably 15/16 years of age, to transition from diary keeping to what I now know to be art journaling, I wasn't thinking about teaching or helping others. I wasn’t thinking about a path of study or a career.
I was thinking about all that was going on in my life that I didn’t know how to talk about, never mind cope with.
I was just finding a way to express truths that felt too dangerous to write in plain words. And in the process, accessing parts of my soul that linear thinking couldn't reach.
I was, without knowing it, reclaiming my creative inner child.
What We Lose When We Conform
The tragedy isn't just individual, its collective. How many of us learned to silence our instincts because they didn't fit the mould?
How many creative, sensitive, differently wired children absorbed the message that their natural coping mechanisms were flaws to be corrected rather than strengths to be nurtured?
I think about the kids who tap their feet to think, who fidget to focus, who see the world in colours and metaphors instead of facts and figures.
The ones whose minds work in spirals instead of straight lines, whose bodies need movement to feel safe, whose souls speak in symbols.
What happens to them when we tell them to sit still, pay attention the "right" way, colour inside the lines?
We learn to abandon ourselves.
To override our instincts.
To believe that our natural way of being, is wrong.
And then, years later, sometimes decades later, we find ourselves in recovery. In therapy. In crisis. Wondering who we are and how we got so far from ourselves.
The Reclamation
But here's the thing about instincts: they don't die. They go underground. They wait.
And when we're finally ready, when the pain of living disconnected from ourselves becomes greater than the fear of being seen as different, they resurface.
Sometimes gently, like a hand reaching through water. Sometimes urgently, like a fire that can no longer be contained.
For me, the resurfacing looked like buying art supplies and not really knowing what to do with them. It looked like making raw, rage-filled but honest marks on paper where words might leave me feeling too exposed.
It looked like slowly, tentatively, giving myself permission to create without justification, without it needing to result in an end product, without the approval I'd spent my whole life seeking.
It looked like remembering the girl who scribbled to embody herself and instead of seeing her as disruptive, seeing her as useful and wise.
The Symbolic Life
Working creatively, especially engaging in what I call "art for self" [you’ll have to listen to the episode for context], allows us to bypass the critical, analytical part of our brain and access something deeper.
The part that dreams, that knows things we can't explain, that speaks in metaphors and images and feelings.
This is where healing happens. Not in the fixing or improving, but in the remembering. The coming home to parts of ourselves we'd forgotten or been taught to hide.
When I work with people & guide them to explore their inner life through art journaling, I'm not teaching them to make art. I'm teaching them to trust themselves again. To listen to the quiet voice that knows what they need. To honor the instincts that were never broken, just misunderstood.
Permission to Disturb
If you were the kid who couldn't sit still, who saw the world differently, who needed to create to survive, I want you to know something: you weren't broken. You weren't wrong. You were just ahead of your time, sensing something the adults around you couldn't see.
Your instincts were right.
Your need to move, to create, to process the world through your hands and heart and imagination, that wasn't disruption. That was intelligence. That was survival. That was your soul trying to stay alive in a world that didn't hold space for the way you were made.
And if you've lost touch with that part of yourself, if years of conforming have buried your creative instincts under layers of ‘should’ and ‘supposed to’, it's not too late.
It's never too late to come home to yourself.
Amanda x
🔒 Do The Work - Inside today's paid section:
Reclaiming Your Disruptive Gifts
If this post stirred something in you, if you recognise yourself as the kid whose natural instincts were labeled as wrong; this practice will help you:
✔️ Remember Who You Were: Reflection prompts to identify the childhood behaviours that were discouraged and reframe them as adaptive wisdom.
✔️ Create a Reclamation Ritual: An art journaling practice to honour and integrate the parts of yourself you learned to hide.
✔️ Carry Your Truth Forward: A personal mantra to help you trust your instincts and resist old conditioning.