BABY G (2019)

Drawing & writing has always helped me process my thoughts and search for healing. Making this zine was a way for me to reflect on feelings of being infatuated with someone for the first time and not knowing what to do. Going through high school, I watched as many of my friends start dating and forming deeper relationships and I began to wonder what that might feel like. As I got to know this person, I began to experience these feelings in the form of frequent daydreams and fantasies of what a shared future together might look like. The zine documents the story of our relationship in a comic form.

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The title of the zine, BABY G is a nod to the Baby-G watches that I like to wear and it represents the loop of time that I use as a theme in the zine about how relationships and dating experiences always seemed to repeat itself like the way that a clock continuously follows its cycle. In retrospect, I realized that the title could also be short for "baby gay", which can characterize someone who is fresh and new to queer dating culture and all the unspoken rules that seem to exist within it. 

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Rereading the zine 2 years later where I feel that I have more experience and knowledge in how to nurture my relationships (both platonic and romantic), the character I portray as the narrator is very naive in how he writes and documents his experience. Back then I continuously antagonized the other party in my mind and also wondered what might have been wrong with me for our connection to not work out as I had wanted. At the time, I felt that spending more time together would help me fast-forward in figuring out some things about myself and my identity. I wanted direct answers to get 'closure', which of course only made me feel worse, and in a way, I already knew what they might have wanted to say to me. I've now been on the other end where I've had to be firm & communicate boundaries with people in the amount of time and energy that I have available to share. When someone begins to paint a perfect picture of you that's fabricated within their minds, that can be scary. I think in every new person I meet, I learn something new about myself; what I need to work on in my relationships with others and in turn, what I need from my surrounding community to be at my best, and that there's no rush to 'fall in love'.