By JP Seabright
I log myself out of Facebook for the last time. I have deleted my profile. I have ceased to exist. I am liberated. I have done this many times over the last few weeks: deleting profiles, apps, bios, changing my name, my identity, my self.
My final preparation before stepping out of my old life and into my new, like a snake shedding its skin, is to collect all my old photographs. I don’t want to throw them away, I want to remember my childhood. I just can’t bear to see my old self in them – too fat, too fearful, too female.
I crop myself out of each and every photo I can find. I’ve created a digital image of how I should have looked, and have recreated the photos, painstakingly, one by one: cutting, cropping, reshaping, reinserting. Just like I did with my own body.
JP Seabright (she/they) is a queer writer living in London. They have three pamphlets published: Fragments from Before the Fall: An Anthology in Post-Anthropocene Poetry by Beir Bua Press; the erotic memoir NO HOLDS BARRED by Lupercalia Press, and GenderFux, a collaborative poetry pamphlet, by Nine Pens Press. More info at https://jpseabright.com and via Twitter @errormessage.
The Birdseed 