i was never going to be a tasteful lamp

April 13, 2026

I think the obvious place to start is this: I am 6’1, tattooed, and have a buzzcut.

There was never going to be a version of my life where I slipped quietly through the world like a tasteful lamp.

Some people can blend in when they want to. They can enter a room and let themselves arrive slowly. They can choose understatement and have it read as natural. I have never really had that option. Even on days I am not trying at all, I am still fairly hard to miss.

I understood that long before I had language for it.

I knew I was visible. I knew people registered me quickly. I knew that before I spoke, some kind of impression was already forming. And somewhere along the way, instead of fighting that, I developed a theory:

If you cannot blend in, go to the edge on purpose.

Not because you are desperate for attention. That explanation has always felt lazy to me, especially when it gets used on women who simply refuse to make themselves smaller. I did not choose my height. I did not invent the fact that I read a certain way on sight. I just decided that if I was going to be seen anyway, I wanted some say in what the seeing meant.

So I leaned in.

Not all at once. Not as some dramatic reinvention. More as a gradual recognition that I felt better when I stopped trying to mute the obvious. The buzzcut. The tattoos. The color. The clothes that feel too deliberate to be accidental. The tension I seem to like between elegance and confrontation, femininity and force, polish and something just slightly uncooperative.

That tension feels like home to me.

I do not trust things that resolve too neatly. I never really have. I like a little friction. I like when something is beautiful but not entirely obedient. I like when style has a point of view. I like when color does more than decorate. I like when something looks playful at first and then becomes harder to summarize on second glance.

That instinct has followed me into art.

What I am noticing now is that even when I draw something beautiful, I do not seem especially interested in making it sweet. I am not chasing perfect realism. I am not trying to make the line behave. I want something else in it. Exaggeration. Sharpness. A slight imbalance that gives it life. A face that feels less like a replica and more like a mood. More like an opinion.

I am not interested in being easily digestible.

I have never felt much loyalty to making myself simpler for other people’s comfort. I would rather feel true than instantly legible. I would rather create something with charge than something that sits there politely waiting to be approved.

Even my sense of humor lives there. It is not loud humor. It is the humor of keeping a straight face while pushing something slightly past where people expect it to go. A giant bow worn seriously. A silhouette flirting with absurdity but still holding its line. A drawing that is clearly stylized and somehow more revealing because of it.

I think some part of me has always loved that edge, the place where beauty becomes more interesting the moment it stops trying to be agreeable.

That is what deliberate tension feels like to me.

Not chaos. Not contradiction. Not confusion.

A kind of authorship.

A decision to work with the fact of my own visibility instead of arguing with it. A decision to let style, and now art, carry some of the complexity I have never been able to hide anyway. A decision to make things vivid, specific, and a little harder to flatten.

When I look at the way I dress, the way I draw, even the way I move through the world, I can see the same instinct repeating itself. Not blend in. Not smooth it out. Not make it easier. Push it a little further. Add shape. Add color. Add tension. Let it say more.

I think that is what I am recognizing now.

My art is not separate from my personality. It is one more place where it tells the truth.

And the truth, apparently, is that I was never meant for minimal impact.

Not really.

I am 6’1, tattooed, and have a buzzcut.

At some point, the most honest thing to do was make that a language.