GORGEOUS
Album Streaming Everywhere
TRIGGER WARNING
(Keep scrolling for lyrics)
Saying no felt dangerous. Having needs felt rude. My body learned to fold in on itself long before I had words for why. This album is me walking back into every room where that training took root and letting my own voice speak there for the first time.
Every track is a scene I lived, a silence I swallowed, a wound I pressed into sound. Sometimes I am the one harmed. Sometimes I am the one who harms. I don’t separate those versions of me. GORGEOUS lives in that tension. I am both influenced by violence and responsible for my own. The songs hold both truths at once.
The story inside this album didn’t land on the page in order, because that’s not how trauma remembers. PTSD stacks time into a messy pile—childhood, marriage, panic attacks, sex work, deep depression, body dysmorphia, chronic illnesses—all humming at once. The track list follows that nervous-system logic, not a neat timeline.
If you line up the first letter of each song title, the spine spells GORGEOUS FEMINIST. The word “feminist” used to make me flinch; it sounded like a fight I wasn’t qualified to join. Now, for me, it simply names something my body kept trying to say:
my body belongs to me.
The right to say no without fear. The right to safety in my own skin. The right to stop treating everyone else’s comfort like a commandment while my own needs sit in the corner like they don’t count.
I didn’t arrive at that through theory. I arrived there through the mirror.
For years, my reflection was the scariest witness in my life. I could survive rapes, coercion, religious control, panic, and still be more afraid of looking myself in the eyes the next morning. A turning point in my healing came when I started standing in front of the mirror and refusing to look away—jaw trembling, tears, anger, but staying. I’d touch the glass and whisper things like, “I approve of you,” even when I didn’t fully believe it yet. (Thank you Louise Hay). That practice became its own kind of quiet feminism for me: mirror feminism. Reflection as rebellion. Self-recognition as armor. Every time I choose to meet my own gaze with less hatred, the whole architecture that profited off my self-rejection loses a little power.
GORGEOUS maps how consent actually works inside a nervous system like mine. On paper, the question looks simple: Did you say yes or no? In my body, it was never simple. There were years where my mouth said “sure,” while my throat locked up, my hands went cold, my thoughts fogged, my body went still, I smiled. Freeze and fawn responses look gentle from the outside. Inside, they are terror responses. Many of the “yeses” in this album are survival moves that kept me breathing, not expressions of desire. These songs put that difference into language so my body never has to carry it alone again.
Abuse doesn’t show up as one dramatic event. It builds like architecture. There are rules you can’t question. Rituals you’re expected to perform. Rewards when you comply. Punishments when you push back. That structure shaped me in work, in marriage, in bedrooms, on sets. Reading Lundy Bancroft’s work gave me a model for that architecture; this album let me crawl through the house and mark where my own blood had dried in the walls.
Some songs move through the classic victim spaces: the coercive marriage steeped in scripture, the photographer in the basement, the Tinder date where the air turned sharp and my body went somewhere else to get through it. Other songs move through the places I’m least proud of: the dog who felt my rage when I had nowhere for it to go, the partners I hurt while my nervous system replayed patterns I never meant to carry forward. “Why Does He Do That?” and “I Am The Abuser” sit side by side on purpose. I wanted to show the pattern from both sides: the man who wields it and the woman who accidentally learns it. Abuse is a pattern anyone can absorb; healing is the moment you finally see it clearly enough to stop passing it along.
I’m not offering GORGEOUS as a finished healing story. I’m still uncoiling. I still flinch. I still have days where my reflection feels foreign, or where my body reacts like I’m in danger even when I know, logically, that I’m safe. Healing, for me, hasn’t looked serene. It has looked like panic in grocery store aisles, late-night breakdowns on bathroom tile, blackout tattoos turning my skin into a new kind of scripture, mirror work through tears, and learning how to say, “I want,” without apologizing afterwards. It has looked like telling the truth about the times I caused harm, not to erase my own pain, but to keep the cycle from hitting the next generation.
GORGEOUS guides inward, toward the places where my first “no” disappeared, toward the earliest moments where safety got rewired into shame, toward the quiet corners where I still believe I deserve less than I give. Each song is a little map fragment: the girl who never got asked, the young woman whose fear was sold back to her as foreplay, the wife who mistook terror for devotion, the worker who monetized the way men already saw her.
If you’re here on this page, you’re probably not just skimming. You’re likely carrying your own drawer of out-of-order memories, your own body-logic that never made sense on paper. I don’t have answers. I do have a record. These sixteen songs are the clearest record I’ve made so far of how a body like mine breaks, adapts, and slowly learns to love itself without making a new sacrifice out of that love.
I’m still learning. I’m still listening to my own work in reverse and hearing things I didn’t know I was saying. Forward, the album walks through the wreckage. Backward, it feels like it climbs up out of it. Somewhere in the middle of those two motions, I finally start to feel like Joy.
Thanks for looking with me. 🐦⬛
—
May the words you couldn’t say out loud find a home in sound.
May the voice you borrowed make space for the voice you’re growing.
May every song you write pull you one inch further inward,
toward the girl you were and the woman you’re becoming.
A black-wing sits on the wire for you—quiet, steady, remembering.
1. Gorgeous
Foam on top hides the drug. The drink burns like plastic in my throat. My first time becomes a blur of ceiling fan and silence. My body bends to a stranger's metronome. They say "gorgeous" like a compliment, but I reclaim the word as my resurrection. Still gorgeous. Even after all of it.
2. On My Knees
I learn to say yes before they take. I laugh so they like me. I freeze on my knees and pray it passes fast. Obedience feels like love. Submission fits like a glove. I flinch and they keep going. But I was never kneeling. I was waiting to rise.
3. Remember, I Am Him
I was the model in the basement. He frames me like art, presses slow while his family sleeps upstairs. He learns from his father's fist and his mother's tears. He rots like a rose at the root of my throat. But I survive him. I write his version so I can bury it.
4. GRIP
She was my best friend. We sat in the same break room, sometimes with bruises, told the same jokes to survive. She was the only one who knew. When I called to check on her, his voice cut in. Then the line clicked off. She changed facilities and we didn’t work together anymore. I thought she ghosted me. Years later I learned the truth: silence was the price of my pulse. She protected me by disappearing. That's how deep the grip goes. The grip breaks when we stop staying quiet.
5. ENOUGH
He approached me at Walmart. Said he liked my tattoos. We ran into each other again and he roped me into dinner. Trauma bonding over red flags. I wasn't into him, but I let him come to my apartment because I was trained to be polite. He said he just needed to wait for an Uber. Then his hand slid up my shirt. He kept trying. He was pushy. I reached for the knife in the kitchen drawer. That night I learned how "no" feels real. That was the last time anyone took without asking.
6. Orchid Skin
A knock on the door. A Tinder date wrote "20" but showed up forty-five years old. Cocaine in his system. He pressures me to do some. His hands on my face. The mirror watched me hold the scream underneath. I rode the panic in the bathroom after I got him out. I moved. Old fear will always bite at a knock on my door. PTSD Flashbacks inside flashbacks.
7. UNiCORN
The one who stayed. We moved across the country with what we could fit in our car. Pregnant and didn’t know it. Living in black mold. Rats in the walls. Eviction on our names. One step from homeless. But he made breakfast feel like poems. He read my flinch. He asked "is this okay?" and waited for my answer. He delivered our son with no doctors. I used to be scared of doors. He checks them now so I can breathe. Unicorn found me. He maps my PTSD and loves me anyway.
8. Skin In Mine
I didn't report what they did in the dark. Nobody asked, so I answered in skin. Needle speaks what I couldn't bring to words. Chosen pain trains me to stay inside my body. Unchosen pain tried to make me hide. I ink blackout lines where the bruises bloom. Every mark becomes armor. I choose what stays. I choose what hurts. Ghosts don't own me. This body is by design. This skin is mine.
9. Flinch
At ten I planned my way to a soft grave. I wanted to walk into traffic. I wanted headlights to erase me. They wrote "self-inflicted gunshot" like a gift. I almost unwrapped it. It reminded me of those dark years. I’ve come so far, but I still flinch. I flinch when they say I'm possessed. I flinch when they laugh at my mess. I rage when no one else could feel how loud it gets in my head. I flinch. Then I swing the rake. Still flinching.
10. Envelope
Fluent in the sound a zipper makes. I learned to take the cash since at least I’ll get paid. Some clients just want to talk. Some touch till I bruise. One took what he wanted and I bled that night. That was the last envelope. Children’s art and family photo’s on the walls. I walk out quiet like I was never there. His world stays clean. His stories stay straight. But I carry the cracks in a silent weight. I don't go back.
11. Marrow
I learned to play dead pretty so the hands got bored. Smiled through terror with my knees in place. This is for the girl who flinched at love. Who spread her legs to shut them up. Who thought submission kept her safe. Who made her pain a pretty shape. This is for the rage that grew inside each lie I called “me too”.
12. I Hit The Dog
His grip on my throat. Pills in his mouth. I saved his life and cooked dinner in silence. The dog watched. He learned what I learned: affection can switch. One day my hand cracked his jaw like a trap. I saw the monster in me. I feel what power does. I don't want it.
13. Now, Why Does He Do That?
He dumped the food I cooked for him in the trash on his birthday. He was a cocaine addict who used religion to control me. He said I'd end up dead in a trunk. Then begged me to stay. He said no one else would want me. He held me hostage and called it forever. He never needed to hit me to make me fade. He gaslit my memories back into place.
14. I Am The Abuser
Two trauma bombs with the pins pulled. I raged. I blamed. I swung sharp at his arm. His priest said "that girl is abusing you." I buried it. I rewrote his mind. I weaponized calm. I fed him my fear.
15. She Is Joy
I changed my name in a courtroom. I bury the martyr I used to be. Sarah kept me safe by erasing my voice. The marrow held the scream and weighed me down. Both had to go to let Joy arrive. I look in the mirror and say "Hi, I'm Joy." I hold my own gaze. I don't hide anymore. I learn to laugh loud. I like my life now. Joy didn't find me. I built her. She is joy. No one was coming to save me. I saved myself.
16. Trusted You
I was fifteen. He was older. His hand on my chest and I didn't know how to stop it. I hadn't even kissed anyone yet. His soft hands trained the trust away. He told me I was growing up so fast. I shaved my hair. I picked my skin. The bulimia set in. No one noticed I stopped swimming. I keep the pretty locked in a drawer. That's what you do when your body becomes a war. I trusted him. I outgrew him. I wear my armor now.