Even During Hard Times, Keep Writing

A 3-minute-long personal essay of sorts

The planet is warming at alarming rates.

A certain “big power” has nosedived straight into fascism.

Genocides are happening in several countries.

There’s a cost-of-living crisis.

Generative AI is devouring our minds and the water supply.

Women’s rights are being targeted.

Black and brown people are being used as scapegoats to stoke fear and hatred and divide.

Politicians no longer represent the people, but corporations and their own interests.

A government-funded terror organization is killing citizens and doing unspeakable things behind the guise of “immigration reform.”

Note: If you don’t stand for human rights, you are not welcomed here. This is no longer ‘a difference of politics’ this has become a difference of morals.

There is so much more that I can list, but it does get overwhelming. We’ve watched two public executions this month, a third we didn’t hear about until weeks after it happened at the end of the year, and what’s been done about them?

We’re living in a different world now.

How do we continue?

How do we find joy?

How do we come out on the other side of this as a better people? As a better world for all?

I don’t have the answer. I’m not a political genius. I’m just someone who comes from a lower middle-class family and wants all of us to have the ability to live safely and happily and comfortably wherever we decide to land.

I’m also a creative. My choice of creativity? Writing.

I bet yours is too. That’s what’s great about Substack and this community—it’s full of writers. Full of people who write because their heart wants to. Who have stories inside of them because we see the injustices in the world and deliver them to people in fictional stories.

Think of the books that came before us: Lord of the Rings, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, Parable of the Sower. And more recently: The Hunger Games, Children of Blood and Bone (Tomi Adeyemi), Iron Widow (Xiran Jay Zhao), and plenty more.

Most of the older books have become unfortunately prophetic. The books of the last decade or so have offered stories of hope. Stories of overthrowing tyrannical governments (magical or otherwise) and fighting oppression in all its various forms.

We were raised on literature and media that taught us to run at fascists head on, to never let them rise up again. And every morning at school, many of us stood, pledging allegiance to a flag, declaring ‘liberty and justice for all.’

READ: Deleted Disney Post Gets Raw Answers

A big part of me believes many of us took that line to heart. It’s why so many of us in this community have been doing everything we can to stand up and use our voices, written or otherwise.

But I understand if the beginning of 2026 has been one pistol whip after another. We lost Keith Porter Jr., Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and many more to government-issued violence. Many more that we likely won’t ever know about.

It’s these events that have made me feel frozen and powerless this month.

And while I don’t have a great amount of money or influence to do anything that will change the tide on my own, I do have this wonderful community here of creatives. And it is you I speak to today, going through these same hard times as me, seeing people brutalized in the streets—we must continue to create.

We must continue to write.

Telling our stories whether they are personal or entirely fictional is important, even when you’re not sure it matters.

Trust me, it does.

Look to our history. Those writers who wrote despite and in spite of the horrors of the world. Anne Frank wrote while hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Holland. Tolkien openly hated the Nazis and everything they stood for. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Eliison, James Baldwin and many others wrote during the Jim Crow era.

Who will the writers of this era be? You? Me?

Maybe.

But we have to keep writing to find out.

Whether you decide to write articles, personal journals of what’s happening daily, or entire fictional series—we must continue to write.

Keep the pen moving,