L: I have heard you sing, and I think everybody who has will agree that it’s a very powerful thing to see you perform. Can you tell me what music means to you? How you discovered that for yourself?
“It just felt like something that was in me, music and movement also.”
You know, I think ever since I was like five, six years old, I started singing, and I don’t know, it just felt like something that was in me, music and movement also. I started to sing and everybody in my family started to say ‘Oh, you should go to music class’, and I started going when I was about eight years old, to learn the piano and sing. And actually I sang, I think when I was six years old, in a big choir, it was one of the major choirs in Trinidad. I did a solo, because one of my relatives knew the leader of the choir, and she’s really one of the big leaders in our country when it comes to music, and that’s how my story started.
Then I started to sing in my high school choir, also in my primary school choir, all of the choirs, I loved that. But after a while, when I started to become who I was, as in transgender, that’s when things went down for me, because I feel like I didn’t have any support, because my family saw my expression of myself as being wrong. So, that made me feel wrong in every way, and then… Even though I used to still sing and I didn’t care sometimes, I can see now that it really dampened my confidence and the way I should have been developing as a singer, it dampened that, and now this is kinda my chance to renew my identity in music and also to do what I love.
“Now this is kinda my chance to renew my identity in music and also to do what I love.”
So, that’s how I started, but yeah, I never really got to learn my vocal ability the way I should have been able to, because I didn’t have the support and I… Like, being told that your talent is not good when it really is good, just because you don’t agree with my life, is the wrong thing, because then you’re damaging who I am. That’s what my family started to do when I came out as transgender. Well, not only when I came out as transgender, when I started to express myself in a way that didn’t seem to fit the body I was born in.
So yeah, now I’m trying to get that back, because I feel like music and the things that I love free me. I’m already free in the sense that people can’t tell me who I am and it doesn’t matter how people see me, but it’s more about how I see myself. But I feel like music and expression and being able to, the way it makes me able to let go, it gives me a freedom beyond even that, you know? I don’t know how to explain it but it gives me a freedom that makes me feel so powerful, that nothing could tell me what I am. It gives me the power to say who I am and what I wanna do and what dreams I will accomplish and nothing could take that away from me, like just giving me that power and that freedom.
“It gives me the power to say who I am and what I wanna do and what dreams I will accomplish and nothing could take that away from me.”
I think when people are allowed to be themselves and allowed to do what makes them happy, they become the best person they could be. Rather than trying to do something that is not you, you know, that is restricting somebody. Whereas if you really are doing what you feel compelled to do, you actually do it well and you become even more than what you were before.
