To the writers, artists, musicians, and creators,

If you’ve been feeling silent lately, if you haven’t been able to bring yourself to create, or even imagine beginning again, I want to say this plainly: you're not alone.

We are still in the middle of a war, even if the headlines shift and the rest of the world moves on. We’re still living with uncertainty, with grief, with the dissonance of trying to function while something inside us is still unraveling. And in that space, where life goes on and yet nothing is quite the same, creativity can feel impossibly far away. The quiet, generative place inside that once felt full of possibility may now feel unreachable, irrelevant, or simply exhausted.

But that doesn’t mean it’s gone.

The truth is, creativity in times like this doesn't always look like art-making. Sometimes it looks like surviving. Sometimes it looks like noticing beauty even when your heart is heavy. Sometimes it's the way you write a text to a friend who’s hurting, or the softness in your voice when you read to your child at night. These, too, are acts of creativity; small choices to show up with feeling in a world that keeps numbing us.

Still, I know that many of us carry a longing to return to the kind of making that once felt like home. To words, to color, to sound, to movement. To expression that has space to unfold. But we hold that longing alongside so much else: fatigue, fear, disconnection, and often a quiet guilt that we’re not doing “enough.”

So I want to offer something different. Not a push. Not pressure. Not a call to productivity.

Just a gentle reminder that your creativity hasn’t disappeared. It may be quiet. It may be waiting. It may need care and slowness and time. But it’s still yours. It still lives inside you, even if you haven’t visited it in a while.

You don’t owe anyone a finished piece. You don’t have to force anything. But if something stirs inside you, a phrase, a fragment, an image, a half-formed thought-I hope you’ll let it rise. Because this is one way we stay human. One way we stay connected to meaning, to each other, and to ourselves.

And when you’re ready, truly ready, in your own time, you’ll return to your work not out of pressure, but out of love. Out of something deeper. Out of the quiet knowing that even in all this, something in you still wants to create. It might even come on with a great sense of urgency.

Creation is a kind of prayer. Even now, your voice still rises.