Seeing in Color – On My Coming of Age

This piece was inspired by Luis Lowry’s novel The Giver. I interpret the metaphor of color to represent coming-of-age, though there are many other great ways to interpret this.

Everything starts in black and white.

Emotions are either happy or sad.

Everything is either right or wrong.

People are either good or bad.

I can’t say when my first glimpse of color was. I couldn’t tell until I looked back that my black and white childhood worldview, which I had considered normal for so long, was beginning to fade away.

There are more feelings then happy and sad.

There is middle ground between right and wrong.

No one is completely good or bad.

Some days, I miss black and white. I miss the simplicity of childhood. But when I truly look back, when I stare long and hard at my past, I realized that the color has always been there, and it is slowly replacing a longing I have always had to see the world fully.

Nothing will ever be fully in color.

I look through the tinted lenses of my morals, my upbringing, and my biases.

Emotion changes the sharp, precise illusion of logic, in a way that I both appreciate and despise.

With every day, with every new experience that comes, with each new perspective, my vision gains a new color.

I try hard to see every color of the world, with the knowledge that I never will be able to. Colors are infinite. There are no limits to the ways a situation can be viewed.

This is why I want others to share their colors.

However, before I can understand anyone else’s colors, I must understand my own. I must look inside myself, and understand the factors that color my world.

My own understanding will never be complete either. As I continue to grow and change, my worldview and internal perspective constantly shifts, causing me to reevaluate my inner colors. And as this happens, I begin to notice something deeper.

Some emotions will never have words.

Instead of being finite concepts, right and wrong are fluid concepts that no one can fully grasp.

No one is good or bad, but instead everyone is their own unique mess of organized chaos.

Over time, my world has gone from black and white, to having color, and now I realize that even color is fluid, constantly changing, and will never be quite complete.

The urge to share my inner colors with the outside world is one of the main reasons I blog.

I invite you to do the same.

Activity note: I will hopefully start posting more regularly this summer. Meanwhile, feel free to check out my Tumblr page, which I am more active on.