I have a confession to make: My name is Arielle Wasserman and I am a doodler. It’s shameful, I know. It started young; you can go and look through my grade one notebooks- all meticulously filed away by my uber-organized mother- and see the proof in the pudding. The once pristine sheets are rendered unrecognizable, hidden under a layer of hearts, stars and letters until all that remains are slivers of white that my six-year-old self missed.
I’m very boring with my sketches. Seeing as I have no artistic ability to speak of (I passed grade nine art because my teacher felt bad for me) my repertoire consists of lopsided hearts, weird geometric shapes, and my name. Over and over again. In different ‘fonts’ and styles and looks. My friend once suggested narcissism. I told her we were talking about me, not her. Gosh. People are so self-centered sometimes.
As I got older, this dirty little secret became more and more problematic. While it had once been contained to my own personal notes, it was gradually creeping onto homework, assignments and tests. If I finished early on any of the aforementioned, I would get bored. And when I was bored I would doodle. In essence, I was driving my teachers up the wall.
Goody-good doesn’t even begin to describe me. I never break curfew. I don’t jaywalk. I will never go 43 in a 40 zone. So you can imagine my confusion and panic when my teachers reprimanded me. It had never happened before! That was what happened to the ‘cool’ kids, who passed notes and chewed gum during class. (In case you haven’t picked up on this yet, I was a bit of a nerd. I am deeply proud of this. Probably because I still am.) When my Gemara teacher looked at me over his glasses and sternly asked if I thought it was appropriate for my ‘worthless drawings’ to share the page with the Tosafot, I panicked- and promptly burst into tears.
There is something about crying females that turn males into silly putty. And while I have since used this fact to my advantage, at the time I had no clue why my teacher suddenly started apologizing and backtracking and telling me I could draw wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted as long as I just stopped crying. I know an opportunity when I see one: I stopped crying.
I’ve smartened up since then. The typing revolution also helped. Can’t really doodle on Microsoft Word. Trust me. I’ve found myself absently drawing patterns with the mouse more times than I care to remember. And I do my utmost best to keep it to a bare minimum. I often fail. But hey, “A” for effort, right?
A couple years ago, I finally figured out the root of my addiction. As my mother was on the phone sitting at the kitchen table, I watched as she casually picked up a pen, furtively checked to see that no one was watching, and started tracing the flower pattern on our napkins.
Mystery solved.
