Today is National Silence the Shame Day — an annual mental health awareness day founded in 2016 by Shanti Das, built on one straightforward idea: stop letting stigma win. Stop hiding the hard stuff. Start talking.
It also happens to be National Cartoonists Day — brought to existence by National Cartoonist Society, it's a day to celebrate the people who bring the world to life through drawings, comics, graphic novels, and animation.
Those two things are not as unrelated as they sound.
There's a man named Milt Kahl, a Disney animator. He animated Shere Khan, Little John, Tigger — and he gave them all his signature move: the head swaggle. That cocky little side-to-side wiggle when a character is feeling themselves while speaking. While it seems like nothing hard in an age of CGI and special effects, there is so much more to it. If you only know Shere Khan from the live action remake, go watch the 1967 original. Then you'll understand what I'm about to say.
It's incredible because the skill required isn't a skill.
It's a gift.
He wasn't just drawing the same character that looked the same in every scene. That's difficult enough. He wasn't just drawing them in different poses — again, without minimising anyone's talents — others can do that too, and do it extremely well.
This guy made them live in ways that others couldn't.
Because what we are seeing was, (and still is, decades later)
Milt Kahl was one of Disney's Nine Old Men and the man responsible for one of the most technically impossible things ever done with a pencil: The Head Swaggle. That cocky little side-to-side wiggle when a character is feeling themselves while speaking and moving. He deserves more than a paragraph. [Read More Here→]
That's what creating things does. It gives the noise somewhere to go.
Maybe today, mental health is watching cartoons. Or reading comic books.
Maybe it's getting that noise out of your head and onto paper in a stick figure situation, no matter how badly drawn.
You don't have to have it as a job title to be it. You don't even need to be good at it.
Have a go. See what happens.
Worst case scenario, you'll have something you laugh at, ball up and throw (and probably miss) and laugh at THAT. And isn't that the whole point?
For what it’s worth: I'm not, for my "job", officially a blogger, a published author, a writer, a musician, a comedy lyricist, a love song writer, a Spotify artist, or a gremlin wrangler building a 40+ blog universe, yet here I am doing all of it because the loud inside me had to go somewhere. The Daily Dose of Dumbassery. GremTV. Gremlin Olympics. And so much more to come.
I did this. One weirdo with a laptop and an intermittently cooperative internet connection.
You could too, with whatever is in you to share.
Need permission? Here it is. In writing, and everything.
Don't do it because you're good at it.
Try it because... why not? And if it doesn't work out? At least you had a go.
Pick up the pencil. Do the bad drawing. Ball it up. Miss the bin. Laugh at that.
That's the whole point. That's the practice.
The gremlins didn't wait until they were ready.
Neither should you.