Creating Anyway
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There's a particular flavor of guilt that comes with animating multi-colored penguins while democracy crumbles. It sits in your chest like a cold stone, this awareness that while you're deciding between blue or teal color swatches, somewhere actual humans are losing rights you once thought immovable. You know this, because they're your friends. A simple "I'm thinking of you" doesn't suffice.
Every notification becomes a potential harbinger of some new political catastrophe. Your phone buzzes, and for a brief moment you wonder: Is this it? Do I need to join a paramilitary group? And then you look down at your half-finished storyboard and think, "What the hell am I even doing this for?"
The question isn't rhetorical. It genuinely doesn't make sense most days. Why labor over weight paints and character arcs when the background radiation of American collapse permeates everything? The dissonance feels almost offensive – like planning a trip to New York on 9/12.
There's also the matter of audience. Who exactly will be around to watch this cartoon if things keep backsliding? Will anyone care about your meticulously crafted joke about modern dating when they're figuring out which neighboring democracy might accept refugees? Do I even care anymore, and should I be looking too?
You find yourself creating strange mental bargains. I'll just finish this scene, then check the news. I'll allow myself two hours of keyframing, then I'll call my representatives. Your creative space becomes annexed territory in a civil war between making art and making a difference.
What nobody tells you is that the guilt compounds with inaction. The less you create, the more you feel like you're failing at everything – both at being an artist and at being a citizen. Paralysis.
I'm trying to remember something basic here. The act of making something genuine – something funny or moving or true – isn't separate from resistance. It might actually be a fundamental part of it. I cringe at the thought when it comes to what I'm doing, but I find it resonates with me when I think of the art I ingest.
Autocracy thrives when imagination atrophies. When we stop being able to envision different worlds, we lose the capacity to create them. Every cartoon, every story, every stupid little joke that makes someone's day slightly less terrible is a tiny rebellion against the flattening of our diverse human experience.
Is making my silly cartoon characters prance around going to stop fascism? No, of course not. But neither will my anxiety-scrolling through catastrophic headlines. At least the cartoon might make someone laugh, might remind them that we're still allowed to find joy in small things, that there's still a point to all of this.
The truth is I don't know if making things matters in the grand political scheme. But I know that not making things definitely doesn't help. So I keep sitting here, pushing points and syncing audio, caught between the twin suspicions that my work is both utterly insignificant and somehow essential. At least to me.
This isn't a resolution so much as a temporary truce. Tomorrow I'll feel the guilt again. But today I'm going to finish this scene, make these characters move and speak and exist. Because even in a burning building, especially in a burning building, we need to remember what we're trying to save.
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