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Zee's words contain references to self-harm suicide.
Zee
I don't really think of my body necessarily as a temple. I kind of treat it like a thing that needs to perform better. I like to think of the soul as being outside of the body. For me, this is just kind of the weird meat sack I get to pilot and the things that I do to it and the things that I put on it are just kind of just searching to see how much I can do until the body says “no more.” We'll see how long this body lasts. Spiritual experiences and important experiences are something that your soul kind of experiences.
The self-harm scars were a lot about trying to test the limits of … it was less that I wanted to end my life and more I wanted to see if I still felt pain and if I still bleed. Testing the limits of how far the meat sack goes before it decides that it doesn't want to do that anymore. Testing my body. Kind of self experimentation. And as a trans person, it's maybe a little bit of self-loathing, too, because maybe it's that I don't necessarily like the meat sack that I was given.
We don't really get to pick necessarily what body type we have or what we're given at birth. Then with tattoos and stuff like that and body modification in general, a lot of it is about taking ownership of what you're given. And I guess that loops back in the self-harm too.
I'm doing this to me. The outside world and the things that hurt me are things that I can't control. But this is something that I can control. And tattoos are a way of saying this is something that I can control. Adding graffiti to the meat sack I don't necessarily think is the most important thing. The most important thing is your consciousness and your spirit. That's what has all the memories and that's what processes the things that you look at. That's the thing that you have to really take care of.
They're just scary and dark and scary, right? That's a lot about inner turmoil. Some of the things that I gravitate towards when I want to draw are things that are scary; monsters and demons and stuff like that. Things that torment the soul, right? All that edgy shit. It just feels cathartic to draw things like that. They're scary things, but they're there to kind of protect you, right? It's feels like you're healing a little bit.
This is a manifestation of what I'm capable of doing to scare myself or things that I'm capable of to hurt myself. It's like, “What does anything else have against what I'm able to do to myself?” It helps to kind of navigate a world that is very scary and is very dark and foreboding and will chew you up and spit you out.
This image is indicative of a way that I feel sometimes. There's some kind of thing that I feel inside of myself. So it helps me feel better, like I have like a companion in this.
I don't really think that I'll ever do a proper transition role. It isn't that I'm scared of transitioning because again, it's just a meat sack, who cares? But for me, I would be disappointed in the randomness of the outcome.
I would rather wait until I could have a prosthetic body of my choosing. The kind of a “Ghost in the Shell” way. Until I can be an actual cyborg and pick the way that my body looks, I don't really want to take the chance of the biologic transition thing. Maybe that's selfish and maybe that's conceited, but for me, I don't really need any physical proof to show that I have a feminine identity.
I had, as I do now, severe ADHD and I was about five years old and I was staring off into space in class. And my teachers were like, “He's staring off into space in class. He might be having petit mal seizures.” And of course, I wasn't having petit mal seizures, I had ADHD and I was just starting off into space. But they were like, “Okay, well, you should have them tested.”
And so I had to have an MRI. But for whatever reason, the MRI could only be scheduled for some ungodly time at night. So my mom was like, “Well, their bedtime’s at 8, I'll have to keep them up.” So we played Battle Toads. And my mom didn't really like video games or anything like that, but she's like, "I know that if I play this game with my son, they'll stay awake and we can then we can go to this MRI." So the tattoo itself is about, my mom has always been there for me. It doesn't matter if it's something that she really wants to do, she'll do whatever she feels is necessary to help me be a better person and help me out and raise me and nourish me and whatnot.
I think that that story is something that will always stick with me.
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