A creative act is a spark of life. So when life is at a standstill, how do we continue to create?

This question has harassed me ad nauseam since the beginning of this pandemic. I remember, during those early days of fear and uncertainty, being particularly filled with dread by a meme that was circulated online amongst fellow artists. It said something to the effect of, “Shakespeare had written King Lear during a plague.” It presented what seemed to me a daunting challenge: would I use this newfound time and space to create my masterpiece? It was tinged with just enough social media snark-guilt that I felt that if I did not write my own Lear by the end of this “gift” of a time, I would most certainly be a failure.

Six months into this seemingly endless crisis, I have done absolutely nothing creative. I have not taken one idea and actually put pen to paper. I haven’t even tried. My pages, where short films and screenplays should be facing edits and re-writes are filled with cobwebs. Sure, I have tooled around on my guitar here and there but fine-tuning my bar chord’s really does nothing for me in the long run.

I have been utterly paralyzed.

I incessantly wrestle with the why? I have more than enough time these days to allow my obsessive brain to feed on questions like these. Why am I incapable of creating during this time? Why has every shred of artistic discipline I’ve ever had left me? It’s a vicious cycle of guilt and anxiety. The more I ignore what I should be doing, the more I don’t want to deal with the guilt of not doing it. And so on and so on it goes. I often see a ghost of myself in the early morning hours of a restless night, which are at this point a regular for me. The ghost looks like me, in just February of this year. It stands before me, a better more confident self. Suddenly, February me starts violently screaming at me in bed, “This is how you spend these precious hours of your life? You’re lazy. You’re weak. You should be doing more. Writing more. Working more.”

As time has gone by, I’ve begun to realize that who we were in the non-plague times, our very identities were all relative to a society that no longer exists.

And that is what has led me to the recent realization that the act of creation in-and-of itself reminds me of everything we’ve lost. I can’t create without remembering a time I could do so freely. Every project I started pre-plague had potential. Anything was possible. Now we all must reckon with an undeniable fact: None of us lives in a world of potential any longer.

Art should reflect the moment. We all know the age-old adage that art often serves as a mirror to society.

I have no idea how to wrestle with this moment.

I watch about 10-12 hours of news a day. It plays in the background as a constant reminder, a little voice in my head that no matter what I do I can’t fix or escape this new reality. I am not in control. But I don’t want to dig into it. I don’t even know what to make of it. Maybe it’s because I can’t make any sense of it. Maybe because it doesn’t make sense. Maybe I can’t control a narrative that helps me understand what is happening. Art needs a reference point. All art is inherently in reference to the society it exists in. Comedy is in relation to firm social norms. Ideas of love and tragedy exist in relation to a fundamental understanding and illumination of the world around us.

And yet, we are in the midst of the most uncertain period of time in a generation. There’s no baseline to refer to. No foundation to reflect on.

In moments of sporadic and fleeting inspiration I ask myself, what do I have to say about all of this? What insight do I even have to offer? Or do I even have a right to try?

How can I create when there are so many people dying, so many getting sick, so many important social justice issues, so many lost jobs, so much workplace abuse, so much gender disparity, so much wrongful prejudice against sexuality, so many dying from abuses in parts far across the world, so much hypocrisy pervading our lives on a daily, hourly, minute to minute basis?

How can it not consume every waking minute of my day? How is the loss of my own livelihood, potentially my entire career not supposed to consume me? How do I forget the fear I have for my loved one’s who may be vulnerable to this virus? The spiral never ends.

It occupies my mind. Almost every waking hour.

Right now, I tend towards things that help to soothe. Things that give me comfort. I try as best I can to find ways to forget the woes, even for a moment. It doesn’t work. And I know deep down that these tendencies are antithetical to creation itself. As artists, we must dig deep, rip scabs off of wounds, tear open our guts and take a hard look at what is there. As dark and ugly as it may be. As long as it is in pursuit of the truth.

But here I am, six months in, unable to create. Because doing so would force me to actually face all of these truths. It would take it from the intellectual, the way I can cope with all of this mess and bring it to the full-blown emotional. A place I am afraid to go.

I don’t know that I have it in me. And I’m not sure if I should.

Stay Safe,

Robbie

Robbie Tann is a professional actor, writer, director & college professor. He has worked extensively in television, film and theatre for nearly a decade.

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