I am a trans, queer, nonbinary, disabled, neurodivergent person, who is used to operating out of an absence of representation; unsatisfied from an early age with meta-culture's refusal to represent people like me, I told myself my own stories, abstracting my experiences through a set of personal allegories, acted by an original characters, and influenced by decontextualized and frequently altered (intuitively queered) slices from pre-existing media.

Fandom and internet spaces guided my development in this process: I found my people online, and though we were often messy and inelegant and sometimes vituperative, we wrote and drew ourselves (and each other) clumsily into being– we bound together what few accommodating cultural texts we could find, into new shapes and new words useful for describing what we were then already experiencing. We were attempting to value ourselves and each other, to take pride in the parts of ourselves that people told us were deviant and shameful– our bodies and our mind, labeled excessive and below minimum societal standards; to survive, we took those things we were told to be ashamed of and we tried to cherish them instead.

It was not easy, but better for the company.

My work is continued engagement in that project. It is a mythology (stories/cultural objects with which to explain the world), composed from a personal iconography, in turn scrabbled together from a protean and disorganized mass of formal academic research, pop-cultural/fandom engagement, and the world at large. It is still populated with original characters initially designed before I knew what queerness was, that there were other people like me. Those characters have changed as i have changed– in pursuit of social spaces where I can exist authentically and as I pursue physical transition; they are ledgers of my history, symbolically and literally.