We try and banish whole inner realms. Sometimes, you have to touch the thing inside you're most afraid of and see what happens when you touch it rather than look away from it all the time.
The first CD I bought was Brandy and Monica's 'The Boy Is Mine.'
Arca means 'box' or 'wooden' in very old Spanish. It's a ceremonial container where you store jewelry or valuables, an empty space that can become pregnant with whatever music or meaning I give to it.
I kind of roll my eyes when people say they make music for themselves or they make art just for themselves, because, maybe in their head, what that means is that they're making it for someone who they don't think is real. Their audience isn't real. But it's still a communicative act. It's still an outward manifestation of longing.
With 'Lonely Thug,' I constructed a fantasy character who was very masculine and strong and almost threatening, but his demeanor belied some complication.
'Xen,' to me, was a necessary excursion inward, into myself. 'Mutant' is a response to it and is more extroverted.
It's not about living my life as a boy or a girl - but I'm also not trans - it's just that one day, you wake up feeling masculine, and one day, you wake up feeling feminine. The flickering in between those two states is what's most fertile for me.
Speaking two languages fluently makes each language not so important.
As a kid, I spent a lot of my mental energy hiding who I was and attempting to fit in.
I think, with every kind of creature and every kind of human, there is no better. We're all just mutations, and I think that each mutation should be celebrated.
I have a very healthy dose of scepticism towards what identity is and what personas are, maybe because of my life journey. Identity is something so malleable.
I've learned to use things like softness and vulnerability as weapons against the things you feel ashamed of in yourself.
I hoped that being attracted to men might go away, but what I never ever hoped would go away were the feelings of femininity, and of softness and fragility, that could live inside of a boy. They were private, but they were mine.
