i spent my childhood quietly in the midwestern suburbs of kansas. life at home and in school felt uncomfortable and rigid, like the idyllic cookie-cutter neighborhoods that i was sheltered in. i was a preadolescent trans girl consciously exploring gender for the first time in a place that required conformity to survive. existing in the closet became a necessary fact of life. as i grew up engulfed beneath layers of coping mechanisms, i mourned the life i was excluded from: a suburban girlhood that i could only witness in my dreams. the pressure of the gender i was forced to enact weighed down heavily throughout my adolescence. my experiences were shaped into something dishonest, ingenuine, and out of my control. i’m conflicted now, between accepting the memories that i have, and grieving for the ones i never had.

girlhood begins to unpack this double-edged sense of childhood nostalgia. through a process of grief and reclamation, i resurrect the past and return to the scene of where i grew up: old school grounds, neighborhood parks, cul-de-sacs, playgrounds, and old river trails. i photograph to recall old memories and to evoke a new sense of ownership over the spaces where i once felt helpless. a time of harrowing isolation rushes back to me: a place where i’d hide from other kids at recess, a moment looking back towards the gymnasium locker rooms , a secluded bench to cry on after school. as i move through these moments with my camera, i obstruct the lens with a dreary softness. the fogginess alludes to a pictorialist celebration of beauty and at the same time reminds me of what it looked like to see while holding back tears. a dichotomy that pulls at my instinct to hold my childhood dear to my heart, while those same memories induce deep set patterns of disassociation.

in creating space for these complex feelings of grief to manifest, i find in the soberness that follows, a will to acknowledge the past, but no longer be haunted by it.