Pinned in Place

..Y me quede en mi sitio como Mariposa de museo... Esta situación nos tomó a todos por sorpresa, en mi caso siento que me dejó en pausa en pleno vuelo. Tenía muchos ánimos de trabajar, viajar y crear; y de repente todo paro.
Me siento como de esas mariposas de museo, esperando algún visitante para ver pedacitos de la vida pasar frente a mi. “Pinned in place” con alas de colores vibrantes pero sin poder volar y vivir en el mundo.
Espero poder quitarme estos alfileres de encima pronto para poder abrazar a los que amo, trabajar con más ganas que nunca y vivir cada momento como si fuera el último.
Gracias @olga.piedrahita y @daniellelafaurie por invitarme a participar de la iniciativa #editorialdomestica #modaimaginada que me ha permitido dejar mi imaginación volar libre dentro de mi casa.
Y gracias a @neramniminde y @amcamelovega por permitirme convertirlas en mis muñecas de papel y jugar un rato.

PRIDE

This is a post that I have been wanting to do for a while but have been struggling to write. I hope this is a text that supports the LGTBQ+ community and doesn’t offend anyone. If I do offend anyone, I apologize and ask you to reach out so I can learn how to be a better ally.

Portrait of Bambi

Rainbows are something I associated to my childhood, Lucky charms for breakfast on Sunday mornings and running so fast when I saw one to try and get to the place where it ended.

Now rainbows have taken another meaning; rainbows are like war paint, a sign of strength and bravery to be who you really are and not be scared of what others think about you.

As a cisgender straight woman, I am learning everyday how to be an ally. I believe pride is something everyone struggles with; to be proud of yourself and what you do, to make your family proud, live up to other’s expectations and the fear of disappointment. But what if to that very natural and brutal desire of making others proud you add being someone others don’t understand and that doesn’t conform to the heteronormative dynamics of society?

What if others tell you that who you are, who you love and what you feel is wrong, sinful, shameful?  

How can you be proud?

Pride is about being comfortable in your own skin. Pride is something worth celebrating as an act of resistance, as an act of selflove.

 Its June and everything turns rainbow, ready for battle.

 It is important for us to remember how the annual parade of glitter, skin and rainbows started.

This year marks the 50th Anniversary of Stonewall Inn riots. The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the LGTBQ+ community against a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. They are widely considered to constitute the most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBT rights in the United States.

For me celebrating pride is a way of fighting against homophobia, hate and misogyny.

 My way of celebrating and showing my support to the LGTBQ+ community was asking three members of the LGTBQ community who I admire to let me take their portrait and share a bit of their story.

Bambi (@aboynamedbambi) is one of the most stylish people I know and has a presence that could light up a stadium. He is unapologetic and isn’t afraid of taking words that are meant to hurt him and making them his own. He blurs lines and makes everyone around him feel alive. As a latino gay man he embraces all parts of himself and is someone I look up to.

Tia (@tiawhitney) was outed in High school while living in a small town in Utah, she wasn’t ready to come out and her mom was not ready to hear it. Fast forward she now lives in NYC and has found a supportive community and her mom has accepted who she is. I admire the strength she had to be able to find herself when she felt lonely and surrounded by rejection. She is extremely caring and loving and an example of moving forward.

TIA

Annie (@trittscamera) is 7 weeks post op from top surgery. They are non binary and prefers them/they pronouns. They have shared their journey in social media which is painful yet beautiful. I reached out to Annie and told them I really admired what they were doing because I know there are so many people out there that are struggling with their identity and seeing their story makes them not feel alone. Annie says one of their happiest moments was being able to be shirtless in the park for the first time since second grade. A lot of people don’t understand why someone would go through such a painful procedure willingly. My answer was in Annie’s smile and their relationship to their new body.

Annie 7 weeks post op

These are three out of countless stories. Stories of people who have been brave and unafraid of being who they really are. They are proud and I admire them and see them as examples of who I want to be as a human being.

TRICH

What do you do when you are stressed?

Do you eat? Cry? Get moody? Clean? Go to the gym?

For Anna Victoria Moore, a 20 year old Atlanta based model, the answer is “I pull my lashes out”.

Literally.

Trichotillomania is an obsessive compulsive disorder where people that suffer from it have the uncontrollable impulse to pull out hair from their body. It’s estimated that four percent of the population worldwide have this condition which is hereditary and more prominent on women. Anna’s first trich episode happened when she was around four years old and since then she has learned to live with her illness.

When at age nine she started receiving treatment to manage her decease her family discovered that her grandmother on her father’s side also had it, but she had hidden her condition from her loved ones by using wigs and fake lashes her whole life.

Anna’s case of trichotillomania is not a severe one and she only pulls her top lashes, where in other cases people also pull hair from their heads, eyebrows, arms, legs, and even genital areas. She explains that when she is involved in stressful situations, she is filled with anxiety and unbearable tension and only finds relief from it when she pulls her eyelashes out. When she does this she does not feel pain, but experiences a sensation of all her worries fading away.

Her condition has affected her career as a model in multiple ways, from agencies refusing to sign her because of her illness to a make up artist in Greece calling her disgusting for not having eyelashes. Anna little by little feels more comfortable going out without her lashes and has decided to share her story in hopes of reaching out to people with her condition. She aspires to see more people in the media with trichotillomania and to inform society of this and other mental illnesses, and how people with different conditions can live a normal life.

I’m inspired by her and wanted to showcase beauty in vulnerability. Maybe someday we will learn to see beauty in unusual faces.

*This article was first published in VICE Colombia but have gotten several request for a translation of this piece.

Special thanks to Piper Von Hoene for the make up artistry. http://www.pipervonhoene.com/

What are you?

“What are you?”

They ask.

A million different answers pop in my head while I try to find the correct one.

What is it that defines me?

The color of my skin? The gender of my naked body? Where I was born? Who I prefer to go to bed with?

If you ask me, I’m a paradox; black and white and everything in between.

When I first moved to the US people would constantly ask me what I was; a question that always confused me because I wasn’t sure what they were really asking. In Colombia we are all mixed in such a way that most of us don’t know about our heritage nor care in the way people in the US do.

What intrigues me the most about the question is why people ask this. Will the answer give you an insight to me as a person, let you know how I should be treated by society or at least tell you in what box you should put me in?

I think there are far more interesting questions we should be asking people. We should be finding answers that unite us and build bridges instead of segregating us in little boxes.

I Don´t like Mondays

I Don´t like Mondays

Why would you kill someone?

Why would you decide to shoot out of your window and shoot at a stranger?

A 16 year old´s reason was she did not like Mondays.

Brenda Spencer was only 16 years old on January 29, 1979 when she decided to shoot out of her window at Grover Cleveland Elementary School killing two and injuring 8 children and a policeman. As she was hiding and barricading herself at her home after the shooting, a reporter was able to reach her and asked why had she done it.

Her answer: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day”

Known to be a troubled teenager with a couple of arrests, she lived with her father in poverty after her mother left them; sleeping on the same single mattress as him surrounded by beer bottles. In December of 1978 a psychiatric evaluation arranged by her probation officer recommended that Spencer be admitted to a mental hospital for depression but her father refused to give permission.

When I was little I got disappointed one Christmas when I got a microscope instead of a telescope, my six year old self didn´t know the difference between tele and micro and couldn´t understand why if I wanted to look at the stars I had gotten a weird artifact with blue and red liquids and glass slides. My disappointment is nothing compared to what Brenda must have felt when she asked for a radio for Christmas and her dad got her a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic .22 caliber rifle with a telescopic sight and 500 rounds of ammunition. When asked why he might have done that, she answered, “I felt like he wanted me to kill myself.”

Instead of giving her the help she needed her father decided to give his teenager daughter a gun she later used to shoot at 11 people, which made her go down in history as the first mass school shooter in modern history.

We live in a society that its easier for people to get a gun than get help.

Do you still think there is not a problem?

Brenda was sad and troubled.

She wanted a radio.

Daddy gave her a gun for Christmas.

She shot 11.

Created for HAVE DIGITAL