Please, hear me out.

Two minutes after the instant of my birth, my sister was born. I have always been involved with otherness. “You can’t be twins, you don’t look the same”—a fixed assumption that denies us at the same moment it determines our fate. In the eyes of others, who we are and what we are not depends on sight.

In fourth grade, a razor sent my hair free-falling to my ankles. Unencumbered by self-analysis, I did the unheard of—willing appeared genderless. Like most children, I was young with everything to learn. My impulsive head-buzz encouraged me to discover a separate sense of Self so another’s eyes would not control my meaning.

One moment I felt free and my next memory is being restrained. My face was discovered and my body signed to a modeling agency. I became an image framed, studied, handled. Now I am inked because the emptiness provoked by the gaze needs to be translated. I am confident in today’s media saturated culture, humanity needs help being heard and wants to feel less alone in their otherness. We need a sense we can depend on, that unlike sight is not projected, but is genuinely felt and lived in. I am dedicated to exposing the interior voice and if a mirror is needed to see the Self, my text will unfold into a mirror of the mind.

Committed to role-playing at a young age, I communicated a story through sight alone. As an image, I conveyed no personal truth and my identity was constantly changing depending upon another eye’s translation of my appearance. I was imagined. Then one day, my body changed. Heavier—others wanted to see less of me. Skeletal—others believed I meant less.

Avoiding mirrors, I denied my body was dying and that my reality of Self was damaged. Reversing the gaze, I turned inward to make sense of my image disorder. And for the first time I saw my Self. In the silent language of the nerves—a reality felt but not seen—my behavior’s intentions were translated. Writing made me face my Self—an interior sight I knew, if communicated, would help others be free of surface impressions. Through narration, I became aware of truth and discovered how the Self could finally be known and genuinely experienced.

Writing saved my life. I am pursuing an alternate discourse modeled on the mind to help rescue others from what I consider the alienating and deceptive effects of the visual world. Coming from a theoretical discipline at Gallatin, New York University’s Individualized School, I hope to filter in theory under the guise of fiction and change what is assumed readers can handle. We need something new and courageous—something letting us reside within our Self, while facilitating a more genuine engagement with the Other via its relationship with our inside.

Inspired by the écriture féminine movement, my postmodern oeuvre mirrors a post-structural consciousness—paradoxical, as opposed to contrived perfection. At graduate school I want to continue clarifying the contradictions of reality—Self and Other, genuine and ideal being, interior and exterior. Not wanting meaning to be lost in a dense forest of words or have poetic prose idealize, I have recently freed language of filters. My purpose is to reveal the real by communicating vulnerability and the core’s emptiness. Since my passion is to have eyes visualize the inside, the “I” must speak in a relatable language so my experimental and philosophical fiction is accessible and seduces the reader into risking what I risk—the truth.

Empowering every generation to decide how they are seen in a world where the exterior is prioritized and idealized, my singular voice promises change both in literature and Self. Wanting to be heard my entire life, I am writing on behalf of my survival and life dedication to others seeing inward.