"With the art therapy, as soon as they saw the paper and crayons coming, we couldn't get it out fast enough. And we told them to draw about the tsunami"
About this Quote
Paper and crayons land in the room like contraband hope: an object so basic it becomes irresistible. Connie Sellecca’s line captures a familiar post-disaster truth without dressing it up: people who’ve just lived through chaos will reach for any tool that gives them a little agency back. The urgency in “we couldn’t get it out fast enough” isn’t cute; it’s a small admission of how starved the survivors were for a safe outlet, and how unprepared the helpers were for the intensity of that need.
The phrasing also reveals the strange choreography of organized compassion. “We told them to draw about the tsunami” is blunt, almost managerial, and that’s the point. Art therapy is often sold as gentle and organic, but in crisis settings it can be directive because everyone is racing the same clock: shock hardening into silence, trauma turning into a lifelong story no one can touch. The instruction to draw “about the tsunami” is a nudge toward narrative control - taking an event that happened to them and turning it into something they can put on a page, contain, revise, even tear up.
As an actress, Sellecca speaks in anecdote and sensory detail rather than theory, which makes the moment legible to a wider audience. She’s not performing expertise; she’s performing witness. That matters culturally, because celebrity humanitarianism often gets dismissed as optics. Here, the telling detail isn’t the celebrity. It’s the stampede toward crayons - a reminder that recovery isn’t just food and shelter, it’s meaning-making under pressure.
The phrasing also reveals the strange choreography of organized compassion. “We told them to draw about the tsunami” is blunt, almost managerial, and that’s the point. Art therapy is often sold as gentle and organic, but in crisis settings it can be directive because everyone is racing the same clock: shock hardening into silence, trauma turning into a lifelong story no one can touch. The instruction to draw “about the tsunami” is a nudge toward narrative control - taking an event that happened to them and turning it into something they can put on a page, contain, revise, even tear up.
As an actress, Sellecca speaks in anecdote and sensory detail rather than theory, which makes the moment legible to a wider audience. She’s not performing expertise; she’s performing witness. That matters culturally, because celebrity humanitarianism often gets dismissed as optics. Here, the telling detail isn’t the celebrity. It’s the stampede toward crayons - a reminder that recovery isn’t just food and shelter, it’s meaning-making under pressure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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