Last June, in the middle of Pride month, I was verbally assaulted in my neighborhood.  Stopped mid stride by a man, then yelled at for a block and a half to “get that festival bullshit” away from his property.  He  was half a foot taller and 100 lbs heavier than me, but I was the threat to him at that moment,  while wearing my new pink jacket with sweet pea blossoms tucked into the buttonholes.  To those coded as queer out in the world, this is not a unique experience.  It’s par for the course when going outside for many, especially trans femmes of color. I was frustrated, angry at the parts of myself that were shaken, for not having a thicker skin, for being bothered, scared, at such a brief and yet charged encounter.  There was a palpable dissonance of relief that things didn’t turn violent and the fury that a part of me believed this is what I deserved for how cute and happy I felt the day.  Stuck between an internalized pressure to be the levelheaded transmasculine saint, and the anger, fight response boiling inside me, I shut down and raged inward.  

These images are created using the found/discarded paper I was carrying at the time, the flowers poking out of my pocket, and the jacket I didn’t feel comfortable  wearing for three months.  This series is an alchemizing of these materials and emotions, dissolving the ideas of male/female, monster/saint, safety/danger into something new that I don’t have words for yet but can exist in these collages.