Happiness Quote by Lynda Barry

A lot of creative paralysis starts as crowd management: the private fear that other people will police your volume. Lynda Barry’s “I wasn’t afraid to be laughed at or be loud” reads like a small act of defiance, but it’s also a practical recipe for making anything worth seeing. In cartooning, “loud” isn’t just decibels; it’s line weight, exaggeration, emotional surplus, the willingness to make a face on the page that would look ridiculous in a mirror. The medium rewards the audacious and punishes the cautious. A timid drawing looks like a timid thought.

The pairing of “laughed at” with “loud” is the tell. Barry understands that ridicule is often the first response to sincerity, especially when it’s messy, childish, or too much. Being loud is socially coded as inappropriate, feminized as “shrill,” and dismissed as attention-seeking. Barry flips that: loudness becomes a creative instrument, not a personality flaw. The subtext is permission-giving, not just to others but to the younger self she often champions in her work and teaching - the kid making weird voices, the teenager overdoing it, the adult still haunted by the impulse to self-edit.

Context matters: Barry’s cartoons have long treated everyday shame as both subject and fuel, turning awkwardness into narrative propulsion. The intent isn’t bravado. It’s a reminder that the cost of not being laughed at is frequently not being heard at all - and for an artist, that’s the real silence.