My room at the residency. Beautiful. I’m excited to work with herbs and words…

I’m at an artist residency for a couple weeks and it’s been an amazing opportunity to really see how much I struggle with my process, with my own artistry, and with a feeling that I even have a right to exist among artists.

I’ve been tincturing and making herbal smoking blends, cooking and nurturing my body. I’ve been experimenting with ideas, and keeping up with a couple long term art projects I mind daily. I’ve been considering ritual and the theater. I’ve been spreading out around a house full of others hard at work, and I’ve been writing, processing, and enjoying the thoughts of the people I’m sharing this space with. I’ve been struggling with my image. Struggling with my body — a month on Testosterone and I can’t put my finger on whether my physical ups and downs are a cycle predominantly related to T, or if it’s just because every week I’m in a new location which is inherently disruptive to my body anyhow. My writing and my art has felt disrupted this week too. I’ve been feeling stuck, but that’s part and parcel of the tension building which is artistic process… I wait and work when I can and listen to the things I need and try to give them to myself. This morning I had a breakthrough revelation of so many conversations coming together in my head. It felt great.

My Reishi Tincture start! The beautiful fungus that you must carve like wood.

I’m turning my solo show, NO SHAME, from a 30 minute event into a 75 minute one. There’s a lot I want to say that I haven’t touched on, and so much has changed since I started writing it year ago. There are newfound pleasures to throw at my audience, and an evolution of thought and personal journey I want to bring to the stage. I want! I’m a little overwhelmed by all that I want.

I want this. I deserve this. I want this. I deserve this… The mantra one must chant to get anything done when your work involves making yourself queasy from personal exposure.

I was reading somewhere recently that transpeople tend to have very high thresholds of pain. I wonder if this is because living with a constant repression of self within society builds that tolerance, or if it’s a brain type thing, or maybe just a purely speculative remark I’m thinking too much about…

Some version of the following will probably end up in my show:

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I’m not a fucking freak. I’m just disinterested in sex that doesn’t pleasure me.

I hold a deeply rooted fear that every time I feel pleasure I am alienating the universe. In part, I’m the artist I am because of this very internalized stress. My pleasure, as female, as gender variant, as kinky, and as queer is fecund to my society — it’s clearly illustrated on every billboard and microbrewery label: my ass is for selling, and not by me.

I’d better wise up and look a certain way if I’m gonna get paid to sit pretty in an office somewhere. I should really understand the value of make-up and push-up bras if I’m going to get a job I’m overqualified and underpaid to loathe every second at. I should smile when people say “smile, hon”, because me smiling matches that picture of the model drinking Pepsi Cola they saw earlier, and that makes them more comfortable in the office. Smiling women and soda: yes we’re a commodity, stockable, and part of the courtesy cart just this side of the water cooler. Chattel. Don’t look at my nipples, but please do twist my teets until your coffee is the color which brings you the most pleasure and least stress in this cardboard environment — I bet cardboard is the color you like your coffee too.

One’s daily “grind” is the realist thing we actually build, think about it. How many hours do you invest in that job you like… um… the paycheck from? So please, while at the office definitely comfort the fuck out of yourself — even if that means discomforting me in the process. I am under you.

Under your rank, under your thumb in moments of emotional sadism, under your wing (when you desire the lens of altruism selling your brand), under your pay scale most definitely, under your desk in fantasies… Under you in every way you wish from here to next Tuesday. I see you.

This is why I’m unhireable except to other sluts and dykes, and those of you wanting a ticket to the menstruating testosterone-taking freak show! And I’m happy to have it that way. This work is hard, I’m still underpaid, but I’m proud of what I make.

So now beautiful audience, this show isn’t going to get all open, wet, passionate, and unbridled because your expectation of entertainment is that it’s fun and easy — we’ve got some skills to learn! Here in the temple we call theater I think it’s important to feed the monster. Approach slowly, respectfully, and listen hard to what it wants… Let’s get this bitch warm, shall we?

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

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