Carlos El Asmar wrote this letter to the world and shared it with only a few of us. We asked him if we could share it with you so you can understand the depth of his feelings about F5.
All my life, I have carried a feeling I couldn’t name, a sense of being alone, of being other, of something inside me being wrong.
As a kid, my mind, my heart, and my body rebelled, trying to tell me something I wasn’t yet able to understand. I would get these horrible panic attacks, though back then, 42 years ago, the doctors just called them headaches. No one asked why. No one wondered what my body was trying to say.
But my body knew.
And from that place, from that silence, that ache, that not-knowing, I made a decision, maybe without realizing it at the time: If I couldn’t save myself from that loneliness, I would make sure no one else had to feel it.
That’s why I founded Motionographer. That’s why I created F5. That’s why I built The Motion Awards. Not to build a career, but to build a home for a community, to create spaces where no one had to feel alone the way I once did.
Then, six years ago, I finally started to understand the truth, those panic attacks, the trauma, the substance abuse I developed to quiet it all, it wasn’t random. It was the result of surviving things that were too much for a child to hold alone.
I started to see myself not just as Carlos, but as something bigger: a Martha. Someone who understands suffering so deeply that their life becomes an offering to others. Someone who holds compassion not as a choice, but as a responsibility.
And that’s why, when we began planning this new F5, the theme came to me so clearly: EMPATH.
It wasn’t a branding decision. It was a message from the universe, the same universe that gave me my pain, gave me my calling. F5 was never just an event. It was my love letter to the world. It was me, standing on a stage, saying:
There’s a better way to do this. To create. To lead. To care for each other. To be human together.
This is why it hurts so much to let this F5 go. Because postponing it feels like postponing a piece of myself. Like walking away from my promise.
But I need to remember something, something I’m still learning, even as I write this: F5 was never the promise itself.
F5 was one beautiful vehicle for it, but the promise—to show up with empathy, to build with compassion, to create spaces where people feel seen—that promise lives in me, with or without F5.
Tonight, I was at a work dinner. I haven’t stopped crying since sending the venue cancellation email. I showed up, powered through. People were talking about community and how important it is. They said they were happy I was there.
But in my head, I kept thinking—what do we even mean when we say community?
Because to me, community isn’t just a room full of people who like the same thing. It’s not “you like blue, so you’re in the blue community” or “you like Motion Design, so you belong here.”
No. That’s not what I feel is a community.
The only real community is us. Humans. With our hurts, our dreams, our struggles, our messy hearts. All of it.
That’s the community I want to belong to. That’s the community I’ve been trying to build. Not a club. Not a niche. Just a place where people can show up as their full, messy, brilliant selves and not feel alone.
This is the fight I’ve been fighting my whole life. And today, I’m tired. I’m grieving. But I’m not done.
Because I know this:
I feel alone right now. But I know I’m not.
Even if I feel like I don’t belong in this world, even if everything in me says I’m from somewhere else, the fact that I feel this much, care this much, it proves I belong to something bigger than this moment.
I wasn’t made to fit neatly into this world. But that doesn’t make me special, it just makes me human, like everyone else trying to find their way.
What I’ve learned, over and over, is that no one is above anyone else, and no one is beneath anyone either. Every time life gives me the chance, I remind myself: I’m not better than anyone, and no one is better than me.
What sets each of us apart is not our worth, it’s what we choose to do with our time here.
And for me, that choice has always been to try, in my own imperfect way, to help create a world that’s more empathetic, more creative, more honest, and more human.
So this isn’t an ending. It’s just a pause. A breath. A moment to remember that I don’t have to carry this alone.
To everyone who believed in this, who believed in me—thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
F5 isn’t gone. It’s just delayed and becoming something else. And I’ll be right here, ready to find it, with all the empathy I will always have to give.
With love,
Carlos