My Not-So-Secret Habit

Sometimes when I am alone, I indulge in an old habit from my younger days. I feel somewhat silly revealing this, but hopefully you will understand that I need to come out of the closet about this activity.  It’s not really harmful to anyone, but it’s not that productive either.

Anyway, here’s the big secret. Drumroll, please.

I like to color.  With crayons in coloring books, or with colored pencils on smooth paper.  And it is coloring, not drawing, because I can’t draw worth a darn.  Even my stick people look peculiar.

In my defense, my mother made me do it.  Well, not exactly made me do it, but she used to color a lot too, so you might say she set a bad example.  I knew we had a genetic predisposition to coloring when out of the blue, my oldest started bringing coloring books and crayons to her skating competitions.  At the age of 16 on. I fear she may have corrupted several of her competitors.

I had been clean for several years when I happened to be wandering down the aisles of my local craft store.  I only went in for embroidery floss, I swear!  And I needed a few pens & things, so I took a quick detour into school supplies.  I walked past the classic 64 crayon box the first time, but I kept glancing back at it.  Remembering how all the coolest kids in grade school had *that* box, not the sad little 16 or 48 count boxes unless the teachers specified them.  (They had the 96 crayon box when I was a kid, too, but that bringing that to school was just pretentious. And they never fit in your desks.)

I know, I should never have stopped to pick it up, much less opened it to gaze at the untouched crayons, uniform in shape, but promising a bounty of colors.  Pine Green, Sky Blue, Sea Green…I didn’t need to pull them out to recognize them.  And of course the magically shiny Copper, Silver, and Gold. I stood there, undecided, for a few moments, mentally reorganizing them the way I preferred.  (I always color coded mine by labels…browns, oranges, yellow, reds, greens & blues together.)  I inhaled.  That’s what did me in.  The waxy, cool scent of fresh crayon.

Next thing I knew I was smiling sheepishly at the cashier as I handed over the box, a Barbie coloring book, my floss and a token package of pens.  “I have a niece visiting,” I explained.  Both of my nieces live in the same city I do, and one was 18 at the time.  Curse that slippery slope anyway.

At the moment, I’m crayon-less but I’ve been playing with colored pencils, printing out sayings that inspire me and coloring them in, all on the sly. In my defense, it does make me feel a lot better.

What do you do when you need an activity to soothe yourself with that isn’t reading? Colors? Needlework of some kind? Journaling?