I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't doodling. During my teens, after surviving much violence, art saved my life. I felt dirty, damaged, and worthless, and I expressed these feelings through drawings of suffering angels or shackled women. I liked to imagine my abusers seeing my art and having a change of heart, or understanding the importance of consent. Making art gave me something to live for. I didn't want to leave life until I finished my current drawing, and thankfully I came up with ideas faster than I could draw them. When I got into drugs, making good art gave me something to be sober for. When I began leaving home at age sixteen, though, my art ground to an abrupt halt that would last for a decade while I focused on feeding myself and ending my own homelessness.

After coming out as trans in my mid-twenties, I started making fine art and street murals of TPOC figures to help me feel less alone. An art teacher told me artists who had difficult childhoods tend to be perfectionists with control issues. I suppose that's why I'm instinctively drawn to realism and expressiveness, but also find the chaos of spray paint to be so thrilling. At first, I made only realistic fine art or expressive street art, but over time, my true style has emerged as a blend of both. In mixed media works, I like to re-use materials I find on downtown city streets, like cardboard or warning labels, because they remind me of the years I spent on the streets, too hungry and busy surviving to figure out I was trans. I think difficult pasts are a strength, not a source of shame, and that even damage can be beautiful.