“I’m just not satisfied being with you anymore.”

I stand 6’2” tall and walk queer—all pointed angles, limbs, and joints, and a pansy to boot. At every moment of my life, I’ve been all too aware of the space I take up, physically, emotionally, and politically. In response, I’ve spent most of my life trying to fill a container shaped and limited by others—bending and mashing and twisting and contorting myself into some projection or image or iteration of myself that I hoped would be easier to digest. I’ll poke and prod my self-worth to try and make it something more easily packaged—but what happens when even that is too much? What happens when you’ve bent yourself backwards too many times, and your original shape won’t return?

“I’m just not satisfied.”

And break the dam it did. And when the ugly came forward—when all the excess and vomit and sludge and muck poured out from myself, something funny happened: it felt fucking amazing.

“Satisfied.”

Anger, separation, anxiety, panic, mania, egotism, narcissism, loneliness, hedonism, madness, sex, rage, eroticism, power, powerlessness, up, down, back, forward, in, out. I was being pulled in every direction, and in a sick way it felt good. It felt like I was stretching my legs after being curled up for months. Rather than be frightened by the outpouring of these dark, repressed thoughts, I indulged in them. In fact, I revelled in them. And what came out was a twisted, anarchic, manic sense of liberation. What if I was too much? What if the ugly inside poured past my hands and stained my fingers? So be it. So fucking be it. Take a picture, I’ll blow you a kiss. These photos are the manifestation of this unhinged epiphany: a purging of the excess, a stretching of the limbs. And it feels good to open up.

If I unraveled myself—if I unwound the spooling string of the mess of my mind, letting all the ugly drip out of my mouth and pool at your feet—then would you be satisfied?