No, Coloring at 40 Isn't Regression. Here's What It Actually Is.

A teacher once told me to act normal — stood over my desk in fifth grade while I was under it, shut down, unable to speak, and demanded I behave like everyone else. I was ten years old and I already knew I wasn't like everyone else. I just didn't have words for it yet. Now I'm twenty-four, and I have the words. And I still color. Not because something's wrong with me. Because something's right.

Coloring isn't regression. It's not a sign that you've failed at adulthood or that you're stuck in childhood or that something in your development went wrong and never corrected itself. For a lot of us — autistic adults, ADHD adults, people whose nervous systems run hot — coloring is regulation. It's focus without pressure. It's creativity without the demand to produce something impressive. It's a way to occupy your hands while your brain processes or rests or just exists without having to perform. That's not regression. That's a coping strategy that happens to look childlike to people who've been taught that adult activities should be productive or impressive or at least legible as 'mature.'

Why People Confuse Comfort with Regression

The world has a very narrow definition of what adulthood is supposed to look like. Adults are supposed to have serious hobbies. They're supposed to consume serious media. They're supposed to leave childish things behind — the stuffed animals, the cartoons, the coloring books, the comfort objects, the joy that doesn't serve a purpose. When an adult colors, it violates that expectation. And instead of questioning the expectation — 'why do we assume adults shouldn't enjoy simple, tactile, colorful things?' — people question the adult. They assume something's wrong. Something's broken. Someone needs to grow up. The expectation is the problem. Not the coloring.

What Coloring Actually Does for an ND Brain

Coloring is low-stakes. There's no wrong way to do it. You can't fail at filling in a shape with a color you chose. For a brain that's been told its whole life that it's doing things wrong — making too much noise, not enough eye contact, too particular, too sensitive — that absence of judgment is a relief. Coloring is also sensory: the feel of the crayon or marker on paper, the visual satisfaction of watching a page fill up. It engages your hands and eyes in a way that occupies just enough bandwidth to quiet the noise without demanding all of your attention. It's meditative without requiring you to meditate. And unlike a lot of 'adult' relaxation techniques, it doesn't come with a side of shame when you're not good at it. Nobody grades your coloring.

The Permission You Might Need

If you're an adult who colors — or wants to — and you've been telling yourself it's silly or childish or something you should have outgrown: you don't need to outgrow it. You need to stop letting people who lost their own joy tell you what yours should look like. Coloring isn't regression. It's reclamation. It's keeping something soft alive in a world that wanted you to harden. The people who judge you for it are the same people who think adulthood is supposed to be gray. You don't have to live in their gray world. You can color outside every line they drew.

— Michael

About the Author

Michael was diagnosed autistic at five and non-verbal until they were five. They work at an independent bookstore where they run the entire ecommerce operation. They live in Virginia and have never stopped coloring — not because they can't grow up, but because coloring was never something you were supposed to outgrow.