we’re broken and i’m scared and it’s trying to heal that.
it is so hard to sit in vulnerability. it’s all an attempt.
a fresh wound is tender but so is how you hold a baby – and isn’t that what forgiveness is?
there is some wound/break/cut that happened between people and it is still raw and healing puts stitches in but there is pain there as it heals. and then it heals shiny – a reflection of what we want to see from the healing. i can’t see the scar tissue, but i can feel it.
when i went into the men’s bathroom it wasn’t because there was no line it was because it was a small reclaiming sense of self that hadn’t been there at all today because my binder chafed in all the wrong places and there was this conscious pressure to present in a way that makes me seem ok and fine ingesting an anti-anxiety pill before leaving the house avoiding windows and constantly pulling on the rough fabric of my shirt and the stubbornness and subversiveness won.
some constructed house of popscicle sticks broke but it was the last one in the town so there are just ashes and splinters and i can’t hold it together with scotch tape.
it’s about the body really how it reacts how it breathes how it moves and hurts and falls. i don’t know how to hold that – our instincts are to pull back and to heal and to not touch the stove again once we get burned. it’s an archive we remember.
catharsis can’t happen without the gut – the visceral feeling – i understand through my body it isn’t plastic or constructed it is sweat and shivers stomach drops. it is a space to witness and process not voyeur.
i’ve become more sensitive to violence. my victories reside in making things i don’t hate immediately after and taking enough space to take care of myself. queerness works against the structures in place and my work is inherently queer.
i don’t know how trauma works – i don’t know how trauma works when it is something you inflict on yourself – i don’t know if forgiveness is something i believe in the dirt of the crucifixion says something to me – i wrestle with keeping a notion of strength in vulnerability because i was raised to see it as weakness but we need to own that we get wounds and are not impossible.
maker is the term i’ve chosen because of creating things molding them throwing them on a pottery wheel beams of light actors colliding bodies in space – fuck the pedagogy of high art fuck making stories pretty and consumable fuck using art to distance instead of confront and connect.
Reed Fowler 