snow

I’ve sat in rooms where classical music played softly in the background, only to hear laughter cut through it. Not the warm kind, but the dismissive kind. I’ve watched people roll their eyes at singers pouring their entire souls into every note, smirk at abstract paintings that took someone years, maybe a lifetime, to understand how to make, and dismiss theater as something overdramatic and unnecessary, as if the people on that stage weren’t giving everything they had just to make you feel something.

These were people I was close to. And every single time, something in me quietly broke.

Look, I understand. I know not everyone will love classical music, opera, abstract art, or theater. Taste is personal, and that’s okay. But there is a vast difference between not appreciating something and mocking it. Between saying this isn’t for me and laughing at the person who gave everything to create it.

What made it worse was watching them hear an opera singer and immediately try to imitate it in the most exaggerated, ridiculous way they could manage, as if the whole thing were one big joke. They would do the same with theater, mimicking the performers in overly dramatic voices, laughing at the emotion, the physicality, the vulnerability it takes to stand on a stage and bare yourself to an audience. As if centuries of vocal training, discipline, and artistry were just material for a cheap laugh. I sat there, watching them cackle at their own impressions, and I thought about the singers and the actors on the other side of those performances. The years of practice. The sacrifices. The absolute dedication it takes to produce something that powerful. And these people reduced it to a punchline in seconds.

And yes, I’ll say it plainly. These are the same people who will mock me for using AI to help put these words together. As if the feeling behind it becomes less real because of the tool I used to express it. As if the longing, the frustration, and the heartbreak I felt in those rooms weren’t entirely mine. But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? It’s the same impulse. Find something, and instead of trying to understand it, tear it down.

These artists didn’t wake up one day and stumble into mastery. They spent years, decades, inside practice rooms, studios, rehearsal halls, and concert stages. They sacrificed. They bled for their craft. And for someone to reduce all of that to a punchline in a passing conversation? It’s not just rude. It’s painful to witness.

But what scares me more than the mockery itself is what it reveals. A growing inability to feel. Because to truly experience a piece of music, a painting, or a performance, you have to let it in. You have to be willing to be moved. And somewhere along the way, it seems like people have closed that door entirely. They’ve mistaken numbness for sophistication and cruelty for humor.

I don’t want to live in that world.

I find myself longing, deeply and quietly, for people who still stop and listen. Who stand in front of a painting and actually look. Who let a soprano’s voice crack something open inside them without immediately reaching for a joke to protect themselves from the feeling. Who sit in a theater and allow themselves to be transformed by what unfolds on that stage.

I long for a world that still knows how to feel.

Maybe I’m searching for my people. Maybe this is me putting it into words for the first time, that the environment I’ve been in has felt cold in a way I couldn’t quite name, until now.