If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out (2025)
When I was a kid I felt really out of place. I didn’t yet understand myself as queer or recognize the impacts of my neuro non-conformity, or have the language to unpack and talk about how it felt for my own body to have suddenly been made into an enemy, having been commandeered and imperilled by ramped-up Patriarchal violence the second I hit puberty (and, honestly, it was already imperilled by Patriarchy before I got there, which is extremely disturbing and distressing… and my white body is still pretty darn protected in this colonial nightmare in which we are still entrapped). What kept me around as a teen was connection with adult mentors—some queer, some not, and mostly in the arts—in my community. They held spaces where I could be myself alongside equally “artistic” peers, a group of flamboyant and effusive misfits in a conservative rural community that demanded homogeneity.
These are the “motivational posters” that I actually needed as that teen. They’re inscribed with advice that my mentors imparted to me when I was a vulnerable young person in need of affirmation that who I am and how I move through the world in my fat, queer, disabled body is a valid way of being. I’ve affixed these messages to pages from a book about the botanicals of (so-called) North America (generously provided at a Fat Affirming Art Therapy workshop) using the same stick-on lettering that I use to make my Pride signs every year. They come from a variety of sources: a question asked by a mentor that sent me spiralling towards self-acceptance—why are you so afraid of yourself? Reminders that you’re enough as you are; that we’re dangerous together; that the specificity of your life-force is an important gift to this world; and that we all have the capacity to grow. And quotes from both Harold and Maude and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where I accessed support through parasocial relationships with mentors I didn’t have access to in person through VHS tapes handed to me by mentors that I did, and who saw me before I yet understood myself.
The act of placing these words that have kept me alive (in a very real and tangible way) amongst an array of plantlife flourishing in remarkably different terrains and embodied in a vast array of beautiful forms, and seeing them as part of the greater-than-human world, was a practice of reminding myself to be in living relationship with these ideas as I grow into whoever I will become next.
(Shoutout to Carly Leyburne for letting me go off the facili-plan for the day at their wonderful Fat Affirming Art Therapy workshop—I really appreciate your expansiveness in letting me bring what I needed into my practice in the space, and your generosity in materials access. It really helped me unlock this thing that little me really needed/needs, and I’m super grateful for your assistance!)