The Color Orange
As a young child, specifically 2nd grade, each four person table was decorated with a caddy. Each caddy contained pencils, markers, glue sticks, all the classroom utensils a 7 year old would ever need for coloring sheets, learning to write, and cutting up snowflakes in the winter time. Among the coloring tools was orange. Orange colored pencils, orange markers, orange on the elmers gluesticks, and more. Orange was everywhere.
I’m not quite sure what led orange to become such an eye-sore, but from the moment I entered the classroom, I experienced an absolute repulsion. It wasn’t just a preference; it felt like a sensory overload. My eyes would catch sight of an orange marker and I’d feel a physical jolt of irritation.
Orange, still, exists in my vocabulary and wardrobe alike: very limited. I have managed to withhold myself from breaking more orange things, but the color still brings me to wonder: Why was it so yucky? Was it the warmth? Probably not; my favorite color is yellow. Was it the brightness of it? Or was orange a symbol of the things I couldn’t understand?
At 9 years old I was diagnosed with anxiety. It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I was officially diagnosed with ADHD. Looking back, the symptoms presented themselves significantly throughout my childhood, and I often wonder why it took so long to see them. In elementary school, I struggled with the core subjects, excluding English and reading. Math was particularly difficult. I grew frustrated with myself, my teachers, and my classmates who caught on so quickly. I couldn’t get the logic to connect. During the lessons, I was reprimanded for staring off into space, or for hiding a book under my desk. It bit me in the butt. After a few months, and years eventually, I gave up. I decided it didn’t matter. If I am not good at maths, despite how desperate I was for knowledge, then that was simply the end of the road.
Nearing the end of the year, I remember a statement a friend told me:
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“If you teach me how to draw, I will try and teach you how to do math”
The comment stung. Drawing — a skill that kids ridiculed for being so incredibly insignificant — was what my talents were reduced to. But, being only 10 years old, I accepted the trade. I did not learn math, and the kid who tried to teach me eventually stopped. It taught me a dangerous lesson: I should stick to what I am good at. Anything I could not quickly understand should be dropped.
This heavily influenced my academic pursuit from then on. All through middle school I stuck to subjects I was good at. And I excelled. But it was like a gap inside that my curiosity begged me to fill. A gap I continued to ignore, keeping the words of my friends and classmates at surface level.
This gap in my knowledge is like the color orange. The things I didn’t like, or couldn’t immediately grasp, were tossed aside. The fear of failure fueled each visceral snap of a pencil. But orange, like knowledge, belongs to a spectrum. A rainbow.
As my art progressed, I came to accept oranges. My style developed in one of an abstract form, relying on splashes of mismatched colors. This, of course, included orange. Despite disliking it as a singular entity, the beauty of a colorful harmony took over. I realized I couldn’t just acknowledge it; I had to appreciate it as an essential part of the composition.
Orange is like math. They are things I still struggle to fully understand. Despite this, they remain necessary — a part of the world I can’t ignore. Orange taught me that you can’t disregard something just because you don’t understand, and it creates friction in your mind. Sometimes you have to accept it, embrace it, and continue anyways, because;
you can’t have a rainbow without the color orange.
