Saved by Art

School started out just fine for me in elementary. I got good grades, didn’t get into too much trouble. But even in those years, I was wild around the edges — a free-range kid of the “be home before dark” generation. Summers were mine to roam. I had a bike, a neighborhood, and a pack of dirt-covered friends who ran full speed toward everything.

But once puberty hit, the structure of school stopped fitting. I was supposed to sit still. Follow orders. Stop drawing. Stop playing.

When I didn’t — when I questioned, created, wandered, or laughed too loudly — the system responded with control. The message was clear: fall in line or face consequences.

I didn’t fall in line.

I didn’t shut down either. I pushed back. Not (just) because I was trying to make a scene, but because I felt the weight of something wrong. They were trying to make me into something I wasn’t.

And that’s what kids do — we resist the loss of our inner fire. We push against the quiet death of curiosity.

Even as the trouble piled up, I kept my grades up. Stayed in honors classes. But under the surface, I was coming apart. No one told me that what I felt might be potential. No one said the chaos in me could be something else. I was a walking cauldron of untapped creative energy — misunderstood, misdirected, and nearly swallowed by the silence around it.

When I blew out my knee in high school — the third dislocation — I lost more than just a sport. I lost my place. My people. The team moved on without me. And without that structure, I drifted. But the wild and the free — the ones outside the lines — they let me in. And I let go of everything else.

That’s when the system cracked down harder. At school, I was swatted until I bled. Locked in windowless rooms. Outside school, handcuffed and slapped around by law enforcement.

At the time, I couldn’t explain any of it. I just knew I wasn’t like them. And I never would be.

Systems don’t fear confrontation. They’re built for it. What they fear is the human spirit — the untrainable parts of us. The instinct to play. The drive to make something out of nothing. The courage to care deeply. To love wildly. To speak truth in the language of movement, music, image, and story.

That’s what they tried to take. And that’s what I refused to give up.

What saved me wasn't what you'd expect.

What saved me was work. A tech support job at the corporate office of a national book, music, and video chain.

I didn’t belong there either — but I could draw. And when e-commerce started growing, they needed a graphic designer. Suddenly I had a creative role. A reason to build instead of break. Something in me clicked.

At 21, I found the thing. And I’ve been chasing it ever since.

These days, I teach. Not in the traditional sense, not in classrooms with desks and bells — though I know and love many brilliant people who do. I teach in ways that evolved around who I am and how I move through the world. My work is messy. Improvised. Personal. I build spaces where creativity isn’t measured — it’s set free.

I work with kids. With adults. With anyone who’s ever been told they’re too much, too loud, too weird, too emotional. I help them see that their creative instincts aren’t a liability — they’re a lifeline.

I work to un-teach the lie that creativity belongs to a chosen few. I try to remind people of what we all once knew: that we were born to make things. That play is sacred. That self-expression is not decoration — it’s survival. And that what lives in us is not disorder or defiance, but life itself, trying to get out.

Because I remember what it felt like to be overflowing with energy and constantly punished for it. I remember being told to stop drawing. To sit down. To shut up. To get out.

And I know what it means when someone finally looks at you and says:

That thing you feel? That’s art. And it belongs to you.