Creatress
As a Third Culture Kid, I always related with monsters more than “norms”. When in America, I would be asked where I was from, even though my mom is American and my passport says I’m American too. In Sri Lanka, with a Tamil name, I was too fair-skinned to be considered “one of them”. Anywhere I travelled, I would be confronted with people wanting to know if I’m Jamaican, Filipina, Peruvian, Indian, Aboriginal, you name it.
I was always an approachable monster, foreign and exotic enough to warrant sideshow behaviours from strangers who would touch my tattooed skin without permission. Like I was not a person, I was an exhibit, on display, so different that common courtesy need not apply to interactions with me.
With whom could I be welcomed as “one of us”?
Like a certain breed of hybrid monsters, I too lack corporeal consistency. Depending on my exposure to sun, diet, the cold, my body and face mutate to accommodate my environs. For people who knew me years ago, I am now unrecognisable.
Could this be why I am so good at remembering faces?
I joined a photo-a-day project in November 2009. I got myself a cute, blue Canon Powershot. I wanted to make portraits like those Frida Kahlo made of herself or allowed others to make of her. My first go was in the bathtub, a photo of my scarred feet. I added trees and butterflies and compasses, I detailed two of my ugliest body parts. This image now heads my website.
I had an epiphany: Every time I was in front of a camera my instinct was towards a big, cheesy grin, even if I did not feel like smiling. Looking back at photographs of earlier stages in my life, I saw that same smile over and over. Through all the difficult years, the trauma, the losses, there is that same smile. A broken record.
After the bathtub portraits, late at night, I started exploring emotions through my camera and through its various settings, my favorite being the inverted and color-swap functions. I growled, screamed, cried, felt whimsical, danced, got angry.
I revelled in my monstrousness, my fearlessness, my boundaryless self. Looking at old photos of myself I came to the conclusion that my big smile was a lie. I look at my new portraits and see they are scary, silly, funny, absurd, sad, ridiculous, ugly. But most importantly, they are real.
Re-reading the seminal study about people like me, Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, the authors mentions that many of us TCKs have no identity core, instead we are a sum of many layers. I realised that I started this hybrid/MONSTER project as an unconscious search for myself. According to the authors of Third Culture Kids, as a 31-year-old I am right on track developmentally, as the 30s and 40s are when other TCKs start trying to figure out who it is we are at our core, other than these many layers.
The portraits of me here are my attempt to define all the shapes of my own physical borders. Maybe if I can define these shapes, then my core will be easier to find or, if I must, create.
I don’t look like myself / I look exactly like myself.
-Sezin Koehler, July 2, 2010, Prague
