CONTENT WARNINGS: In this conversation, Soph and Lenh talk about experiences with being misgendered, coming to terms with your identity, body modifications (stick and poke tattoos), growing up in a very conservative/religious environment, queerphobia, having to hide who you are, an eating disorder, and conflict within an activist group. There are mentions of colonialism.
Soph
february 2020
@soph.eml
@two.of.cups.ttt
My name is Soph, I’m half Costa Rican, half Dutch. I grew up in Turrialba, Costa Rica. My pronouns are they/them and sometimes also she/her. I’m still looking for what feels right, and sometimes I get a bit annoyed when I have to tell people again what my pronouns are when I already told them, so I’m just like ‘Okay, it’s okay if you say it, I don’t care anymore’. I’m nonbinary and that won’t be taken away by anybody. It’s nice to have that recognition from friends and people that are close to me in general, but outside from that, I’m more like ‘Okay’. I just want to be at peace, you know? [laughs] Not have a discussion or having to explain myself all the time, so I just go with what people want to address me with.
I really like making art, I love being in connection with plants and nature, and learning about plants and ecosystems and communities. I’m studying art therapy and I want to focus on community support through art therapy, like how we can process trauma together, and how we can actually care for each other more deeply, and not see mental health issues as a personal failure but more like something that is speaking about how messed up the system is and how that system influences the way we relate to each other and ourselves, you know? I’m really interested in that.
I also do stick and poke tattooing, and that’s actually super therapeutic for me, ‘cause it kind of like… Sometimes, I find it very difficult to be in social settings with people or getting into social contexts, sometimes I’m super awkward and anxious about how to act, stuff like that, but when I’m tattooing someone, it’s such an intimate experience, and I feel like people have to trust me a lot to let me do that to them, you know? ‘Cause it’s a super painful experience in a way, and they are letting me give them pain, and I feel like that makes a very intimate bond between the tattooer and the person who is getting the tattoo, and also people very often get tattoos to make sense of their bodies in a certain way or to reclaim their bodies; I know that Nana talked about that, too.
So, yeah, it’s like giving something very special to someone, and it’s going to be with them until they die, so… if they don’t get it taken away by a laser or something, that is. But yeah, I really like doing that, I get into this flow and I kind of forget about all my worries, and I know the other person also just… you’re so concentrated on the experience of the pain and the here and now, you know, it’s so painful that you have to be here, right? [laughs] It’s cool to have that with people.
L: Can you tell me how you got into that? I imagine it’s quite a threshold when you do it for the first time.
Yeah, the story is super cool! I was living at a permaculture farm in Costa Rica before coming here, and I was kind of still… where I grew up, it’s a very small town, and people are super conservative, and there’s a lot of homophobia and transphobia, and I grew up with this feeling that something was wrong with me, you know? Like something really bad was happening with me, because I felt different from other people.
But I was actually in that process of finding out what I wanted to do, and as I said, plants are always my friends, they always make me feel better and I feel like I can connect to them in a very nice way. So, I went to live on this permaculture farm for a couple of months. I was working there and learning about plants, about the community, it was super intense to learn that.
Then this person was there, her name is Caro, she is also a herbalist, and she… I think we were just hanging out one day in her room. The farm was very big and we all had rooms in separate houses. It was super cool, and she invited me to her house, and she was like ‘Would you want to learn how to tattoo yourself today?’ and I was like ‘Yeah! For sure!’ And then we started doing that, and I made my first stick and poke tattoo on my finger. It’s horrible [laughs], everybody thinks it looks like a candy, but it was supposed to be three moon phases.
L: I see, the moons have melted together a little bit.
Yeah, but it was my first stick and poke, and I love that it’s a mess and it shows how unprepared I was and how punk it was. We just started tattooing each other. But it’s super nice, because this was the first queer person, like openly queer lesbian, and she also had a nonbinary partner, so I also heard about what ‘nonbinary’ was for the first time in my life, and I was just like ‘Oh, wow’, you know? It was just like ‘Oh my god, I found like…’
“She was just mirroring things about myself that I wasn’t accepting in myself, and she was living it, owning it.”
There’s this song by a band called Gender Confetti!!!, it’s called Gay Mirror, and I always say that Caro was my gay mirror. Because she was just mirroring things about myself that I wasn’t accepting in myself, and she was living it, owning it, and I was just like ‘Wow, this person is beautiful and so cool, and I love the way she expresses herself!’ So, it’s really special that I learnt how do to this through her. And we’re still friends, actually. She still lives in Costa Rica, but we’re always talking about stuff, she’s a really good friend.
