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Personal Reflection

Simone didn’t mean it as poetry. She meant it as warning.

To create honestly is to bear witness — to feel the weight of a world that keeps breaking and still refuse to look away. It’s not the kind of duty that wins applause; it’s the one that leaves you raw. Because to reflect the times means letting their noise live inside you — letting the chaos, grief, and hunger scrape against your ribs until it finds a sound that feels true.

There’s a loneliness in that kind of honesty. You stop making art that pleases and start making art that confronts — the kind that doesn’t ask permission to exist. Every brushstroke, every word, every note becomes a confession. This is what it’s like to be alive right now.

Simone understood that silence is not neutrality — it’s surrender. She didn’t sing from distance; she sang from the fire itself. Her voice carried the truth that art isn’t decoration — it’s resistance, it’s reckoning, it’s the memory of who we were when the world forgot itself.

If you’re lucky, your work will outlive you. But before it does, it should undress you. Strip away the illusions you built for safety until what’s left is unfiltered, unpolished, unafraid. That’s not art for comfort — it’s art for survival.

To reflect the times is not to mirror the surface — it’s to reveal the soul of the era beneath it.

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Reflective Prompt

What part of your truth have you softened to make it easier to share?
If you stopped protecting your audience, what would your work finally dare to say?