Sometimes I sit at my desk, staring at the blinking cursor, thinking that every page, every chance to breathe a word into the world, is its own version of New Year’s Day. It is the fresh start we all seek, even when the year behind us was a good one. Beginnings are both frightful and delightful awakenings of the soul.
And yet, those awakenings can grow dormant. They dull under exhaustion, under the low grade desperation that comes from living inside a chaotic and conflicted world.
These days, I find myself more determined than ever to be an artist. The news cycle spins endlessly. Doomsday reels play on repeat. I still have not found the single word that captures what it means to be an active helper, a mother, and a writer in an overheated world shaped by an increasingly hostile us versus them mentality.
What I do know is this. Everyone within my orbit feels sharper lately. Voices are harsher. Tones are shorter. Reactions arrive clipped and curt. It feels as if patience, and even belief in kindness, has been pushed aside, left beneath a pot that never stops boiling, with an audience forever stewing.
This is not to say that feelings are not allowed. I am utterly gutted by the circumstances and challenges we face, both globally and at home. I can say, sadly but comfortably, that the language of our leadership has grown more antagonistic than ever before. There is little room left for tenderness in the public square.
But what about us?
How do we design a softer language and a softer way of living for ourselves? How do we resist becoming as brittle as the systems that exhaust us? Can creativity cure anything at all?
History suggests that it can.
Picasso painted Guernica while his country tore itself apart and gave the world an image that still refuses to let suffering be ignored. Käthe Kollwitz turned grief and motherhood into stark acts of witness during war and poverty. Nina Simone transformed rage into music that told the truth when polite language failed. Writers like Orwell, Woolf, and Camus used story not to soothe, but to clarify, to insist on humanity when it was most under threat.
Their work did not erase conflict. It did something quieter and braver. It preserved conscience. It named what was happening without surrendering to it.
So yes, I think creativity can cure something. Not the world, not all at once, but us. It can slow the boil. It can reintroduce patience. It can remind us that language still matters, that tenderness is not weakness, and that choosing to make something honest in a hostile moment is, in itself, an act of care.
When the world hardens, making art is one way we stay soft without breaking.
The Forty Files 