for the first time in 21 years last week. It was because of something I wrote. I was sitting at the foot of my bed, hot water bottle snuggled beneath my knees, two comforters creating a downy cocoon as I talked with a friend over the phone. We were telling bad jokes to each other when my dad called. I ignored it. He called again, so I answered, just to see what he wanted. But he wouldn’t tell me; whatever he wanted to say, it couldn’t be explained in a quick sentence.

An hour later, I called him back. I had a feeling about what was wrong. And I was right.

“Hello?” My dad answered.

“Hi…what’s up?” I asked, ready to defend myself.

“I saw your website. So you’re gay. That’s fine, it’s fine—lots of people are gay. But your prints—I don’t know what to think.”

I didn’t know what to think either. My family and my relationship with them has been the focus of my writing and art for the past year or so. A lot of it is about coming to terms with my queer sexuality while also growing up in a home that valued very heteronormative and Evangelical Christian standards. All of it is up on that website. And all of this had been a careful secret, a juggling act I had been honing for about a year now. But, in an instant, my fingers slipped, and now I was stumbling around the balls dropped about my feet. I had been outed by own work, and now my family also was aware of every feeling of resentment, guilt, and disconnect I was holding on to. Trying to retain my last drop of emotional dignity, becoming almost manic in defense, I willed myself not to cry as my dad raised his voice over the phone.

 “You can’t make art like that. You can’t write stuff like that! Why do you want to hurt people?”

I felt hurt—in a single sentence, my entire past few months of work, and my entire past few years of coming to terms with my sexuality was invalidated. It wasn’t an easy project to make, to actually face the reality of how disconnected I felt from my family, the pain of the assumptions made about me as the only daughter, the expectations I had to assume. Yet, all it did was hurt people?

My parents said the content of my website was disturbing, demonic, like I had some real mental instability. “Why can’t you just create things that aren’t so dark?” They asked me.

The prints are dark. They show crude angles of my naked body, an image of a girl masturbating. They show fingers and hands in sexually suggestive positions. The words mention my mother and our unsteady relationship, and they allude to bible verses with heavy sarcasm. Thinking about the nature of the prints and the writing, my parents’ reaction make sense: if my child made work as explicit as that, while also alluding to their relationship with me, I would wonder what went wrong.

But, I also needed this writing and art to understand these different conflicts. Last year, I wrote a portrait essay about my youngest brother. Through the essay, I dissected the relationship between my brother’s own exploration of femininity and my own transgressive (to my family, at least) self-presentation. Because, while my parents had barely any qualms about his painted nails and My Little Pony marathons, my unshaved armpits and baggy shirts were regarded with more upturned noses.

This essay inspired a print called Last Summer, My Brother, which shows two young kids, a boy and a girl. Both are dressed in tutus. The boy stands on the left side of the page, and the girl on the right. Above the boy, the words read “The don’t notice you / they notice me” and above the girl reads “It’s not fair.” The essay and the print grew into a negotiation between how I could identify with my brother and his gender explorations, yet how I also felt a lack of belonging within my family. This print is one of 15 in a series, each print showing a different formative memory or moment from my childhood and adolescence. Manifesting these difficult experiences, emotions, and relationships within my family in a visual narrative, I was able to process and understand my situation. My work saved me.   

 “But life isn’t all happy!” I tried to explain myself. “Life is uncomfortable, life is ugly sometimes.” Then, under my breath, I apologized to my housemates on the other side of the wall; I don’t think a discussion about the philosophy of art was the bedtime story they had envisioned.

“Okay, but you can’t make work about other people, especially your brother. You just can’t.”

Sure, I could document the parts of life that are lighter, that are sweet and happily unexpected. There is a value in recognizing the more lovely parts of life; I’m not saying that we should all draw the curtains and dwell in doom and gloom. But, the only way you know that the uplifting parts are so uplifting, is because you’ve experience the darker moments. I discovered that you don’t really realize how unhappy you were until you’re actually happy. The darker and the lighter moments of life aren’t mutually exclusive; in fact, they are deeply intertwined. When I write about the guilt and the feelings of disappointing my parents as their only daughter, it’s also a story about the relationship of a mother and daughter, of a father and daughter, and the strength of those bonds. When I write about the repressive, conservative Christian environment I grew up in, I also find the humor in the way that, of all situations, that was what I ended up in—it’s hilarious.

I write because life is dirty, because life is gritty, because life is hilarious. I write to find this amusing juxtaposition within moments, relationships, and everyday interactions. But, as life and its peculiarity drive my work, can I still write and create ethically, without hurting others? My family’s pain and strong opposition to my work wasn’t uncalled for—I did allude to ways they had unintentionally hurt me and rejected me. Yet, the reason my work is so difficult for my parents to look at is exactly because of this—it’s about the pain they had caused. While I need to value the privacy of others, I also can’t censor myself.

My writing and my art serve as a channel for my thoughts. I titled my print series Some Things I Cannot Say, because I felt voiceless among my family, voiceless about these more intense and complicated relationships and experiences. At the end of our conversation that night, my dad asked me why I had never brought any of these issues up. My entire life, I had no voice in my family, no way to express how I truly felt. Yet, when I finally did communicate my thoughts through these prints, I was again only met with rejection. I realized that no matter what I try and communicate within my family, it will never be completely valid, never be completely valued. That might never change.

My dad hung up, and I began to immediately map out an emotional coping plan, now that I could never make another work of art or writing ever again. But, of course, this was foolish: yes, my voice within my family was stifled, perhaps never to be fully heard. However, how can I justify stifling the voice that I had found within my art and my writing, the only voice I really had left? It is because my family silences me that I must keep making and keep writing.

A few mornings after my initial conversation with my dad, my parents called me again.

“So, honey, I know this project is a large part of your portfolio…but how do you ever expect to get employed? There’s a lot of weird stuff on there, stuff that 98 percent of the population will find disturbing. People won’t want to hire you,” My dad said, completely out of love.

“I dunno…I mean, my professors thought the series was pretty impressive, they really liked it…” I wasn’t sure how to explain that, perhaps, the provocative nature of my art and writing would actually help me get a job.

Still, I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. Because, of all the possible parts of this situation my parents could fret about—my sexuality, my relationship with them—their main concern was whether or not I’ll get an internship this summer.