Coloring Outside the Lines

May 29, 2026

By Morrison

An introspection on Perfection, Permission, and Becoming

I grew up being taught that coloring outside the lines was wrong. Not just “messy,” not just “try again,” but wrong in a way that carried weight. My art teacher at the Deaf school would hover over my drawings, pointing out every place where my crayon slipped past the border or where a streak of white showed through because I hadn’t filled the space perfectly. My grandmother would sit beside me, gently but firmly correcting my grip, my strokes, my choices. Stay inside the lines. Do it the right way. Make it neat.

Perfectionism wasn’t a personality trait I developed. It was a lesson I was trained into.

And like all lessons taught early, it followed me into adulthood – into how I work, how I move through the world, how I judge myself, how I try to fit into systems that were never built with me in mind.

The Rules We Inherit

Cutting along the lines was the same story. I hated those school projects where we had to cut out shapes and paste them onto paper. My cuts were never straight enough, never smooth enough, never perfect. The scissors would slip, the paper would bend, and suddenly I’d be outside the line again, wrong again. Little did anyone know that I had a “lazy” eye, or perhaps it was hinting the subtle signs of me being not just deaf, but deafblind – that made these so‑called simple tasks harder than they looked. But instead of understanding, the adults around me doubled down on the rules. It’s strange how these small childhood moments become metaphors for the rest of our lives, how they teach us to shrink, to obey, to fear mistakes. How they teach us that the world is a coloring book and our job is to stay inside someone else’s outline – an outline designed by ableism, upheld by people who didn’t know any better (and many still don’t).

This sense of perfectionism didn’t stop in the art classroom. It followed me into hours spent with a speech therapist, where “perfection” meant stripping us of our natural voices, our being. They raped us of our speech, linguistically, culturally, bodily where they would forced wooden tongs onto our tongues, forcing our hands onto their throats to feel vibrations, then forcing their hands onto ours to match those vibrations. Say, “Ahhhhh!” Again. Again. Again. Then moving our hand over their lips to feel the “Shhhh” and “pahs.”

Then it was off to occupational therapy to learn how to cut those lines “right.” Every session was another reminder: stay inside the lines, fix yourself, be correct, be acceptable, fit in.

Art That Refuses Containment

Recently, while working on a tactile piece of art, I found myself molding clay and laying it onto a canvas. One piece hung off the edge, just slightly, just enough to be “wrong.” My first instinct was to fix it. To tuck it back inside the border. To obey the invisible teacher still living in my hands. But then I stopped. Color outside the lines, I thought.

This is my art. My canvas. My rules. No one gets to tell me where the edges belong.

That moment cracked something open within. Because the truth is, the most interesting art, tactile, visual, musical, has always come from people who refused to stay inside the lines. Frida Kahlo’s Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas) and self-portrait with cropped hair, Salvador Dalí melting clocks across impossible landscapes. Van Gogh’s Starry Night’s swirling the sky into motion. Freddy Mercury, Björk, and Radiohead – musicians who bend sound into shapes no one had heard before, an idiosyncratic style. They didn’t follow the rules. They made new ones.

The Lines Society Draws

As a DeafBlind person, I’ve lived my whole life inside other people’s lines… lines drawn by teachers, by systems, by communities that don’t know what to do with us but hope to fit us in this imaginary box of “perfectionism.”. Even recently, after cataract surgery, I found myself feeling ashamed of the big, clunky sunglasses I had to wear. They were designed without care, without aesthetics, without dignity. And I felt myself wanting to hide, to blend in, to not be “obvious.” That old voice in me again: Don’t color outside the lines.

But the truth is, DeafBlind people are always outside the lines. We don’t fit in the Deaf community’s box. We don’t fit in the Blind community’s box. We don’t fit in any box that currently exists. We are the misfits, the rule‑benders, the ones who spill our drinks when we try to pour in our cups, who reach for the food with our hands when the fork or spoon misses, who bump into people who weren’t in our visual field, push and sweep our cane rather than tap it – rattling loudly down the sidewalk, bump into something and knock something over, who touch everything because touch is how we know the world, it is how we create access… space.

And some people look at us with disgust, the same disgust my art teacher had when my crayon slipped. The same disgust society has for imperfection.

Touching the World Anyway

We’re told not to touch things. Museums put up signs, “Do Not Touch.” Store attendants glare at us, questioning if we are about to snatch something into our pockets or about to break something. Strangers recoil when we reach out. The same effect when walking down the sidewalk with my cane, people either stare down at you, or don’t even notice at first because they’re preoccupied with their phone in their hand until they crash into you. When they do, they get this appalled look on their face (so I’ve been told). Children would be pulled away quickly as to not get “infected” by the cane. But touch is how I navigate, how I orient, how I survive. I touch food to know if it’s good. I touch clothes to know their texture, size, and how it’s made. I touch my way through on a bus, the train, the shelves, the world. Touch is how I access information.

I cross lines every day, not because I want to, but because the world’s lines were never drawn with us in mind. And yet, every time I cross one, I’m reminded: Imperfection is not a flaw. It’s a form of truth.

The Beauty of Being Outside the Lines

To color outside the lines is to be human. To be real. To be uncontained. To be willing to exist in ways that don’t fit the template – “the norm.” We are taught from childhood that imperfection is shameful. But the older I get, the more I understand that imperfection is where life actually happens. It’s where authenticity and creativity lives. It’s also where authenticity breathes and thrives.

DeafBlind people, in particular, live in a world that constantly tells us we’re “wrong” – wrong for touching, wrong for bumping, wrong for spilling, wrong for eating with our hands, wrong for existing outside the expected pattern. But our lives, our art, our ways of moving are not mistakes. They are innovations. They are adaptations. They are access. They are forms of beauty that refuse containment. We are not inside-the-lines people. We never have been. We never will be. And that is our brilliance.