you stupid slut

From the author: "you stupid slut is a full-length hybrid memoir that started as an ode to my carefree early 20s and slowly turned into a reckoning with who i thought i was. i dove deep into a pool of memories from (loosely) 2014-2019 that i had (almost entirely) tried to forget about and realized the role that my own reckless behavior played in the immense amount of harm this period of my life caused me. it's about reckoning with a loss of faith in love and humanity, but also so much about the ways i so desperately needed to prove i was lovable. i attribute a lot of the reason i didn't understand my queerness until later in life to the fact that i spent most of my early 20s indulging in a pattern of self-destructive hypersexuality and substance abuse, both of which were born as coping mechanisms for unresolved emotional trauma. between art bros and older coworkers in the service industry, most of my time was spent in an environment where it was advantageous to me to perform femininity, and the 'cis woman suit' (affectionate) i wore coupled with my survival instinct to be seen and never heard ended up causing me far more harm in the long run than the benefit of a temporary dopamine rush from being reckless. where stop saying sorry spoke to my mental state during that period of my life through digital ephemera and snippets of thought expressed by vague finsta captions, you stupid slut recollects 'the pretty lies/the ugly truth' (MARINA) through poetry, prose, form experiments, scraps of paper i probably shouldn't have saved, and forgotten disposable camera snapshots."