The Uncolored Carousel

On a random Tuesday, I decided to look into my storage where I stumbled across an old box with all of my stuff throughout the years. It felt like a time capsule, almost. In that box, there were two specific coloring books that were given to me when I was in 3rd grade or more so, I begged for them.

I remember being so obsessed with those coloring books, so obsessed that I wanted to save them instead of ruining them by messing up the color scheme. I didn’t trust myself to color it; I wanted the color scheme to be perfect. I kept them in a hidden place that only I would know because that’s how important they were to me. But slowly, they became forgotten items that felt like they never existed to begin with.I looked at them and thought to myself, When was the last time that I colored? I sat down, put my headphones on, and pulled out the old coloring pencils from the storage room that I once treasured so much.

I flipped through each page and came across my “favorite” one , it was a picture of a carousel. I never allowed myself to color that page because I wanted to wait until I got better at coloring. Ten years later, that page was still blank. I realized that when you’re so busy chasing something you can’t even define, everything you once treasured fades away. The youth that I spent trying to be perfect became a forgotten memory. I decided to color the carousel. My mind went silent for the first time in a long while. It looked better with messy colors than it ever did blank.

Does that mean I finally became perfect enough to color it?
No. It means I finally allowed myself to be “just enough”—for the first time.