How does one live in a body when they have spent an entire lifetime trying to escape it? “The Fingers Won’t Let Go” is a painfully honest memoir. Through performance, video, and audio I navigate many years of bullying due to fatphobia and its implications on mental health. The audio and spoken word walks us through childhood and teenage experiences of bullying, while also sharing anecdotes on how bullying is alive and well during adult life. The work forms and archive of feelings and trauma – it is an amalgamation of shame, intimacy, grief, rage, love, and ultimately catharsis.

The ubiquitousness of hands and fingers permeate throughout the work, but even literally as molds of hands climb my body. All of the hands are in the forms they take when bullying the fat body: pinching nipples, grabbing skin folds, slapping faces, or in the shape of a fist. I purposefully use my own hands to signify the internalizing of fatphobia that one endures after surviving such events; we become our own bullies. Ultimately, the piece ends with the dream of having the fingers finally let go.

This archive of trauma is also a queer coming out story. Not only is the piece an outing as a survivor of bullying, but also an outing for cis-gender male, homosocial relationships. Both run parallel as the burden not to tell creates its own network of psychic wounds that far exceed the event itself. I place moments of extreme trauma alongside moments of everyday emotional distress that are often the only sign that trauma’s effects are still being felt.

Ultimately, the work seeks to create a space and dialogue towards fat liberation. Everyday forms of trauma, especially those emerging from systemic forms of oppression demand an understanding of trauma that moves beyond the clinical constructions of psychology. Once the cause of trauma becomes more diffuse, so too the cures, opening up the need to change social structures in a broader form rather than focusing on the individual. I hope that activism around fat liberation becomes a response to psychic needs.

The Fingers Won’t Let Go
20-minute audio, video, and performance, silicone hands, metal skewers, yellow shirt, yellow balloons, 2023, variable dimensions