You are a not a Monster (2024-2025) is a lyric game played over the course of 28 days (a moon cycle). It is meant to serve as a way to recognize the often challenging and difficult work of caregiving. It may be read in a linear fashion or at random. The physical instantiation of the game is a card deck that you can pull from at random. The game itself is a series of gestures and performances that may be read as a ritual or exercise. The dithered flower imagery accompanies each text as a way of giving flowers.
This piece is a lyric game and a love letter for caregivers. As someone who has provided care to my partner battling cancer and to my mother who sustained severe injuries from a serious car accident within the past couple of years, I wanted to create an experience that honors the ease, comfort, solace, and rest caregivers might need as they provide care for loved ones (biological and chosen). The unseen and quiet work of caregiving comes in all forms and permutations. While I acknowledge the professional work of front-line workers such as nurses, certified nursing assistants, and home health care professionals, these are jobs compensated by a company or institution. While vital, they are enabled through industry, capital, and a circuitous insurance system and complex infrastructures.
You are not a Monster (2024-2025) is intended to be played over 28 days (a typical moon cycle), but it may be played or read in any way the player sees fit. It is dedicated to the caregiver who bathes their mother or takes their partner to the hospital in the middle of the night with an alarmingly increasing fever, to the individual who cooks, cleans, and provides order despite unexpected and often unpredictable situations that require quick response and unwavering resilience, even when the caregiver provides care through fatigue and pain.
The work is named after experiencing intense emotions, including envy, anger, rage, and sadness, during caregiving moments. Yet, being socialized and conditioned to provide care and be in service to another, when these feelings arose, I often associated them with feeling monstrous because those feelings seemed counterintuitive to care. Caregiving is not meant to be a joyous experience. Yet, as a culture, it is often associated with emotions and themes of selflessness, charity, and obligation, particularly for women or feminine figures. Through this work, I want players, particularly caregivers, to feel that a moment of "play" is explicitly meant for them. This work is intended to serve as a reminder that embodying emotions is vital to healing and liberation, as caregivers require constant healing to remain present.
In its digital instantiation, the game entails flipping a digital card, reading the prompt, and enacting it (if possible). Each prompt within the game may be read in any order. One way of “playing” the game involves reading a prompt once daily for a 28-day cycle. The prompts are designed to serve as a meditation, a time for reflection, and a means to process challenging emotions. A limited-edition printed card deck, accompanied by a booklet and a special message, will be produced.
Over the past few years, I have taken photos of flowers, plants, and foliage during my walks and explorations of different places I have visited. The dithered photographs of flowers and plants that appear in the game are intended to represent a garden or bouquet for individuals reading and playing, especially those in a caregiving role. Ideally, this digital version is designed to be sent to a caregiver and shared to create a rhizome of caregivers who may or may not be performing these prompts in tandem or asynchronously. It is a gesture of giving caregivers, everywhere, their much-deserved flowers.