There’s something haunting about sitting in your childhood bedroom, looking around at the old splatter stains of your nightmares of youth, someone you are no longer. And yet you were, once.
I refuse to be embarrassed about my past and who I was. Everything that was done, I did out of my purest reactions and true necessity. And if I didn’t, I either fixed it or learned from who I was. I’m sure there’s still more learning to be done, but I won’t be embarrassed about that either. I think our mistakes in some ways are our most authentic, raw version of ourselves. Who you were during Covid and how you swear that you’re different now, or in middle school. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you are different -- I am. But sometimes there’s a tone of voice, someone who is talking down to their previous version of themselves in a condescending manner, like “can you believe I used to be like that?” Well, I refuse to be that person. In fact, I actively try to both understand my old versions of myself and hold hands with her.
I think a part of my way of expressing my authenticity is my unabashed enthusiasm for talking about fan fiction. Because first of all, I can’t think of a greater form of love and artistic creation than thousands of people sitting down for FREE and ANONYMOUSLY while writing absolute poetry. And secondly, because it is “embarrassing.” It’s like a statement screaming, “This is who I am, show me now, who are you?”
I wanted to do this photoshoot in the bathroom because, truthfully, I wasn’t always this confident. I was a very shy child, turned into a loud teenager who had insecurities slipping through the cracks. Sometimes, it was really confusing to understand who I was and where I wanted to be. Or rather, who I wanted to be. The bathroom became my sanctuary - no one could disturb me in the bathroom, and if they did, they were the weird ones. You can stay there for a while, too. I played with makeup, talked to myself in the mirror, studied my face and body, cried, sang songs, and most importantly, dreamed. My bedroom is a reflection of who I am and my thought processes, but the big moments happened in bathrooms.
The bathtub has always felt like the safest place for me, no matter where I was. I could break down my walls and just be me, whoever I was that day, away from the rest of the world. And now the time has come for me to, in some ways, introduce myself to the artistic world. So I thought, where better than how it all began?
