I’m making art and the world is crumbling
CW: sexual assault, US politics
For the past two days I’ve been basically bedridden with the worst menstrual cramps I’ve ever had. The pain was bad enough last night that I woke up at 4:00am unable to do anything except curl up in the fetal position and cry.
Is this just what happens when you turn 35? It’s something I will talk to a doctor about, for sure. The good news is I was at least able to walk around the apartment a bit today.
But that’s not the point of this post.
The point is that being in this condition means I haven’t been able to work much on my creative projects in these past couple of days. Only two days of this and I already feel like I’m going insane.
It’s not because of some weird workaholism or capitalist notion of productivity that I feel this way. It’s because every day the news breaks my heart, and making music and working on my game are two of the very few things in my life that still make sense. I don’t know how to fix the world, but I do know how to make little bits of music blend together nicely in Wwise.
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About 8-10 pieces of horrifying news ago, it was announced that a former high up person at Unity was sentenced to 22 years in prison for a slew of horrific sex crimes. Apparently he was still employed at Unity while his trial was happening. I read on Bluesky that he was at DICE this year.
Nobody reached out to me to check in if I was doing okay with the news, which hit extremely close to home as someone who was sexually assaulted by an industry colleague a few years ago. I’m not blaming anyone. I think people are understandably afraid of making me feel worse by bringing up potentially triggering news, and obviously everyone is dealing with their own shit (and the constant onslaught of bad things happening).
But still. I wish someone had.
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My upcoming EP, Soap, is ostensibly about one of my favorite hobbies, soap making. But it’s also about my ongoing, 10+ year process of healing from sexual assault trauma. Each track is based on a different type of soap (e.g. honey, aloe, oatmeal) and an aspect of trauma healing that I feel corresponds to it.
Last night my cramps went away for a bit and I decided to try to work on the goat milk track. That one is about the warmth and support I felt from leaning on my husband, friends, and community throughout the healing process.
I had a lush synth pad and some swirling, delay-heavy prepared piano sounds. It was pretty, but not quite right. I was so, so stuck. It had been frustrating me for weeks.
I thought about the incredible amount of love and support I got from the game dev and composing communities when I came forward last fall about having been assaulted by someone in game audio, and then it just hit me. I needed mellotron flute. It blended beautifully with the instruments I had in there already, and it just made the whole track feel so warm. I really love the way it’s sounding so, so much.
I was able to work on it for about an hour before my cramps came back. It was the only time I’ve felt at all energized in these past few days.
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A few days before the former Unity employee news broke, I’d already been thinking about writing a blog post. It was essentially going to be about how if you truly want to help people who have experienced sexual assault or other forms of abuse from people in the industry, you should really keep them at the top of your mind when it comes to referring people to jobs.
I feel that I’m mostly in a healthy place now in regards to my experience, but I do go through periods where I simply can’t bring myself to go to any sort of industry events. Being in such a similar community to where I met my assaulter is sometimes just too much for me, especially with news like the above seeming to happen constantly. And if I can’t network, I’m missing out on potential job opportunities. Which means I could really use people’s help to make up the difference.
I was going to write a whole long post about this, but it felt so futile. In the few days after the Unity employee news breaking, there were several other, even more terrifying pieces of news. That’s how it goes, right? The endless barrage.
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Earlier this week, before my period and the awful cramps started, I was working on Divinuet a whole bunch. I coded a ton of stuff, I found and edited clips from amazing old public domain silent films, I composed music, and I worked with my friend Violet Eris B to finalize the game’s logo.
It felt incredible. I felt so creative and accomplished. I marveled over the fact that I’m creating this weird thing that combines so many of my interests (tarot, interactive music, film). I was killing it. I was of course terrified of all the awful things happening in my country, as I usually am lately, but I had a thing I could focus on completely for periods of time. Just me sitting in my studio, trying to create something beautiful, temporarily tuning out the rest of the world.
I felt like it was keeping me sane. Until, of course, Thursday came and I found myself in too much pain to even sit at my desk.
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Right now it’s 1:00am on July 5th. I’m typing this on my phone while laying in bed with a heating pad on my abdomen, and my neighbors are still shooting off fireworks.
The explosion sounds are even more grating this year than usual. I haven’t felt like the 4th of July was worth celebrating for awhile. And of course this year I feel it more strongly than ever.
I find myself wondering a lot whether my problems are worth talking about. Sure, I’ve been a victim of multiple sexual assaults, and it’s been terrifying watching society start to regress on issues of rape culture, especially after it seemed like we were making some real progress.
And of course, misogyny has gotten worse as a whole. The dominant view of people in power right now seems to be that my only purpose for existence should be to have babies and make life easier for the men around me. It’s very, very scary.
But then again, I’m cis, able-bodied, straight-passing due to being married to a cis man, and there’s no seemingly untouchable police force kidnapping people who look like me off the street. Overall, I’m in a pretty safe position.
And my art. It’s not overtly political, although I guess in a way you could argue that it is. Making something tarot-based feels like a bit of rebellion against Christofascism, especially since tarot and other witchy practices seem to attract a lot of women and queer people. I think that’s very very cool, and I’m proud to be helping to contribute to that, even if in a small way.
But it still is hard to look at everything going on in the world and think that any of what I’m doing matters. I’m sure so many other artists are feeling the same way.
But I also think art is truly one of the things that makes humanity so beautiful, and so worth holding onto hope that things can get better. Art matters so much. We need to keep creating. We can’t let anyone take that away from us. And as much as I’m my own worst critic, as much as I sometimes am tempted to think that what I’m doing is stupid or not important, I need to keep stubbornly doing it. It’s the only way forward that I know.
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I’m not saying that hiding away and making music is doing enough to make the world a better place right now, when so many people in power are actively making it worse. It isn’t. I’m in a position to do more to help out in my community, and I’ve been exploring ways of doing so.
But I’m realizing that, now more than ever, I absolutely need to keep creating, in the same way I need to keep breathing and eating and seeing my friends and noticing the birds singing around me every time I walk outside. It’s endlessly important. It’s vital. And it’s what I do best.