My inner community and me

Zora with help from Alana

Trigger warning:

• childhood sexual abuse
• childhood abuse
• explicit/offensive language

Written by Andrea with interventions from Zora, team Andrea Speck

Andrea: In this blog entry we would like to talk a bit about our zines, and what making zines means in our therapeutic process. It has been quite a surprise, to be honest.

We made our first zine between Christmas and New Year, and since then we have made several zines. The truth is that we have made each zine mainly for ourselves, not thinking about other people.

17 September 2000: "It's funny what you can do with a PC. It's so easy to change sex (gender), and I don't even look bad as a woman (...) A gender change is an interesting thing, and maybe I should try it once in reality (I have this desire to dress in women's clothes anyway, and maybe at least once I should give in to that)".

Trigger warning: child abuse and childhood sexual abuse

When I recently made the fanzine of La Rigby, drawing and writing it, I realised that Rigby is a girl and not a boy. Probably, when you read the zine, you realise that at one point the pronoun with which I refer to Rigby changes, to La Rigby. But La Rigby is not just a girl, she is a trans girl.

Since then, a lot of emotions are coming up for La Rigby and for me. Mostly pain and sadness, but also fear. The fear of years of hiding, of wearing a mask. And, as my psychologist recently told me in therapy: living with a mask is like not living at all.

I introduce you to Robert, my inner critic. I met him yesterday for the first time, taking a long bath. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bath is my refuge, my safe space, where I can let myself go. Robert is a boy of only thirteen. He has horror in his eyes, and he is very afraid.

Trigger warning: This text and the drawing deal with the issues of child sexual abuse, child abuse, and bullying..

The last two days I made a rather big drawing - 146cm x 56cm - of the life of Alex (my inner boy/child), Zora (my inner girl) and Rigby (my inner adolescent). These three are the vulnerable parts of my inner community, the parts that have taken the brunt of my trauma. I felt the need to do this, as two days ago I found a key piece in the puzzle of my life that was missing. Suddenly, things started to fall into place and everything made sense.

The drawing itself is in Spanish, and won't be translated.

I understand that the idea that we are a plurality of personalities does cause some anxiety for many people. For me it has been a revelation, and it is helping me to understand myself better.

In our society plurality is often understood as a disorder, a problem of mental health.

Today I feel like my inner girl, 10 or 11 years old, suffering the bullying that nobody sees, and when she fights back, when she gets angry because she can't take it anymore, she is the problem. Everyone - the teachers, my/their parents, everyone only sees her anger, her violent response, so she is the problem (and she is the problem. She is bad, it's not that she just has a problem. She is bad. Full stop).