Let’s talk play. But to talk play, I need to side step a little into inner child work- I know it is cliche and the kind of stuff you find with images of the silhouette of a woman in a field reaching her hands to the sunset and words like ’embrace your inner child and allow her to heal you’ but I have had some discoveries around play this last fortnight and, well, I guess this is what you write about in a blog.
First, let me ramble. During the week, I have some small events turn into big mental events around my sense of worth and value as well as my ability to know, express and meet my personal and emotional needs. When I took this feeling to my psychologist, she asked if I could recall the first time I felt this sensation. As we all do, I have a few key moments which stand out in my memory and this question took me back to an event in kindergarten, which I have brought up in therapy several times over the years.
We had a substitute teacher and were doing a craft activity which involved painting a sheet of paper as a blanket and then sticking crepe paper on the ends to make the tassels. One table at a time, were were invited to go up the front of the room and collect our crepe paper. I recall I had taken time to paint my blanket beautifully, since I loved to paint and draw. When my turn came to collect my crepe paper, I remember approaching the tray and carefully selecting three pieces which matched my colours and grand vision. This wasn’t even a planned process, I was just so lost in my craft that this is what made sense and felt right for me to do and, being a child, that is exactly what I did.
As I stood to return to my art, the teacher stopped me, yelled (or maybe talked loudly, I was five so my memory is hazy) that there is no way I could do the activity with only three bits of crepe paper and then told me to go and sit on my chair as I was not allowed to finish the activity. I really didn’t understand what I had done wrong. One moment I was enjoying and creating, the next I was in trouble and so so scared of the substitute telling my teacher how I had been so naughty.
This was a moment where my wants, needs and enjoyment were the cause of anger in someone else and shame in me. My five year old internal processing joined some dots that said ‘my wants and creativity cause pain, so I need to be careful not to do that again’. Even to this very moment I procrastinate from doing art because it might be wrong or bad, and it is only recently that I became comfortable with people watching me create and draw. Being openly creative or meeting my wants and needs is perceived as a personal risk. That is how schemas work. They make no logical sense, they just happen based on experiences and learning.
So when I brought this event up to my therapist (again), it was no surprise when she suggested I do a little inner child work and give ‘Little Karen’ what she needed in this situation. To be honest, I have never liked inner child work. It doesn’t change what happened and it always feels sappy and like you are just making things up. But I could see what she was getting at so I settled in and followed her guidance.
As I worked through giving ‘Little Karen’ what she needed, I began to see that what she needed was to just make her blanket as she wanted to. She had a plan and a process happening that was based on just doing what felt right which was abruptly stifled and admonished. I comforted her, told the teacher to check her priorities because that was really not something to punish a child for (seriously, right?) and then I encouraged Little Karen to finish the artwork however she wanted. Next minute I was genuinely involved in allowing Little Karen to paint a million paintings, one after the other. Paintings that were literal. Paintings of houses and people and animals. Paintings that were done quickly and discarded because she really just wanted to move paint around on fresh pieces of paper in basic school acrylic primary colour paints. Then she drew and coloured and just spent the time day-dreaming and lost in colour and stories. Little Karen loved getting lost in colouring and drawing. My therapist asked if I could leave her a gift, so I left her some nice pencils because the school ones kept breaking and all the nice colours were always missing or never replaced. There is nothing worse than a bucket full of brown pencils that keep breaking.
In developmental psychology, play is fundamental. For a child, play is work. It is how they make sense of the world, form ideas, build social skills and develop their problem solving and creative minds. Being given the freedom to play is one of the most important things you can give to a child. There are ample articles available about this topic, searching for ‘Jean Piaget’ is a good place to start if you are interested.
As we get older and our neural pathways become more and more fixed, we loose this ability. Tasks need purpose, they need an outcome. Add social structures and expectations and play is slowly squeezed out of everything, we no longer have time for such ‘purposeless’ activities. But this doesn’t mean we are no longer forming views and taking in experiences even though we are adults, so why can play not be a part of this ongoing learning? Carl Jung acknowledged how important play was for the adult when he said “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.” Play is the starting point of finding our joy and place in the world. We do seek it as adults and it pops up in elements like binge watching endless episodes of fictional stories, the use of ‘roll play’ in therapies, or how we simply love to share those perfect pics we create with our phones- under the guise of ‘I just woke up like this’ because we aren’t allowed to admit we created something so frivolous. In modern terms, I think true play for adults is called ‘flow state’ and we are all looking for ways to find this. Even science praises the neurological benefits of ‘Flow State’. Personally, I have always found things come together better when they are allowed to flow and work naturally, and I feel that my art needs this approach too. In short, my art needs play.
So, here’s to play. To making things without purpose, to creating just because it makes me feel nice… if only it were that simple. I need to relearn how to play and let go, just like Picasso had to unlearn how to draw. There are so many other intersections that will come into play in this pursuit, but for now I think just focusing on playing is enough to get me started.