Comic page. (the colors, tbf, are too saturated.)
Text on first panel, showing a wide angle of a small house in the mountains - "Somewhere in Colorado, 2003."
In her room, a young teenaged lioness sits on her bed, on hand on her head, the other in her lap. A smashed lamp lays across the room against the far wall, a crack in a wall from a thrown punch, claw marks torn through the pillow. Some horror movie posters hang on the wall. Her head is wreathed in a violent jumble of black and blue and red, the same noise risng from her clenched fist and surrounded every frame.
Closeup of her face, tears streaming from her eyes.
Flashback to an earlier conversation, she's in a different outfit, talking to a horse in a t-shirt that says "Coach." The same cloud of dysphoric wreathes her head.
The coach says, "So, when are you tryin' out for my team, (dysphoric blur)?"
She grabs her arm self-conciously, looking sheepish as she say timidly says "...Oh, heh... yeah..."
Closeup of her hand, holding a fistful of dysphoria and dark fur.
Cut to another memory, another day. She's at the grocery store, in different clothes. She's taken a box off the shelf that says "Maul Shavers - From those podcast ads you love!" She's got the deluxe shaving kit and looks over her shoulder, head wrapped in dysphoria, as a rabbit woman with a cart says "Oh, you're such a strong young {dysphoric blur}, can you help me reach something?"
Closeup of her first, swarmed with dyspohria, clenching and shaking with resolve.
Wide angle of her, center of a swirling storm of dysphoria, anger on her face. "...I'm done." she says.
Hand turning on a lightswitch, looking down at a dated pink bathroom sink.
We see her from behind, looking into the bathroom mirror - we see the mane on her head, the source of her dysphoria.
Closeup of her eyes, wet with tears and rage as she yells to this false image of herself, "I... HATE YOU."
She opens the cabinet under the bathroom sink and grabs something she's hidden behind the cleaning supplies - the shaving kit we saw her buy earlier.
Her father is an extremely traditional, masculine man, and the idea of owning a shaver would be... horribly laughable. Beyond comedic, an act of betrayal. Emasculation.
She activates the shaver, a pink and blue whirring "bzzzzzz" coming from the motor. Around it, fur begins falling as the twist of black and blue begins falling away.
Looking down at the sink, now covered in stray fur and clumps of dark red hair, the shaver dropped in the sink. Profile of her face as she exhales, the last remants of fur and blue and black noise fading away on the breath, eyes squeezed tightly closed.
Her eye opens, a gasp of surprise coming out of her mouth as she says "Wait... holy shit, that's *me*."
A trans flag unfurls behind her as she touches her hand to the mirror, another feeling her face as she sees herself for the first time and greets the girl she didn't know she could be -
"Hi... Clove."
Old art from #TransDayOfVisibility last year. I want to redraw this sometime, I'd only been drawing for about... 4 months? at the time and I can do better now, but I'm still pretty happy with it and the message is still true - the first person we usually become visible to is ourselves.
#CloveArt
