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Message From EJ

I’m EJ, I am a nonbinary queer person that has lived in Dallas my entire life. My passions are art and autistic activism/education and I am an advocacy team member for the S.T.I.M. Project, an autistic-led nonprofit focusing on accommodation/coping tools for underprivileged kids and adolescents. I am autistic, and as a child, I struggled with language. I had a disorder that jumbled my words to a point I could not be understood by anyone. I remember when I was 7 and I was talking to my mom about being mad about not being in front on a water slide that day. When I went to bed that night, I didn’t think anything of, it but I heard my mom start to cry. Years later I found out that was the first back-to-back conversation I have ever had. As an adult, I would still say that art is an easier way of expressing my emotions. I put what I’m feeling in the painting and not really know what I’m making, but then it’s done and I know. The piece I want to share with the world is ‘meat: from both perspectives’. It is a representation of my current relationship with social media and my experiences and reactions to strangers’s judgments of me and my primarily identify-based content online.