I am getting obsessed with catching up on what I missed in the past, putting an unhealthy amount of hope in people, places, opportunities, situations, I project, I phantasize, get lost sometimes, test my boundaries, push myself too far, but also lay the foundation of who I am today.

I am fully embedded in the structure of art school, I am a believer in the possibility of realizing my potential, there is this moment in time where I am opening up, before everything seems to close down again a little bit further down the road.

2016 is a time of self discovery, a belated coming of age, all while a major part of my life is beginning to come to an end, I am working on my diploma, putting myself out there, queerness is becoming a thing now in my world.

The browser version of Instagram did not display DMs back then, so I wasn't able to see whether someone wrote to me. I did not exactly intend to use it as "social media". Everything was focused on images anyway these days. Stories didn't exist yet either.

On top of the bad image quality, I experimented with image filters, utilizing a couple of them in this image. As an art student in the field of digital media I was fascinated with Instagram as a tool. I told myself this would just be an "art project".

I started Instagram "as a joke". Believe it or not, I was a technology sceptic, didn't have a smartphone, just a dumb phone with a subpar camera. I first transferred the pictures onto my PC and then uploaded them to Instagram via a third party software.

I posted my first picture on Instagram on the 15th of November 2016. This was 11 days after the first opencreek shownight event. It is the first public image of me in drag.