Welcome to Prismatic

Hi. My name is Oliva, and I just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. My pronouns are she/her, and I am a trans woman living in Lynn. Did I always know I was trans? Well, I knew I wasn’t the boy everyone told me I was when I was a kid. But, lacking the knowledge of what that meant or a community to show me who I was, when I was 15 I gave in to the shame and fear society was teaching me about who I was discovering myself to be and buried myself.

Thirty years later, I finally rediscovered what I had known about myself as a child. And now, I am ready to share myself with the world. To tell my story, to share what I think about life and the world and what we are facing as a community, both good and bad. And that was why I originally thought to create this zine.

But I don’t want this to be only my story. I want this to be a place where we can all share our stories. Where we can all talk about what we dream of, what we fear, what we love, what we hate. What we feel about our place in the world, in our city, in our community. Artwork, poetry, stories, essays, photography—whatever you want to create, I would love to be able to help share it with the world.

We are in a dark time right now. A genocide has begun in America against trans people, and while there is still time to put a stop to it that time is passing with little sign of progress. The entire queer community is under threat in a way we have not seen in years. But as dark as things get, as long as we live there is still the hope of joy, of smiles and laughter. We are a community that has been through difficult times before, and we will survive this as well. But to do that, we need to be a community, to be there with each other. And that is what this zine is intended to do, to help us get to know each other better so that we can support each other, protect each other, and love each other. Hopefully you will all join us on this journey, & become part of our community as we struggle to become ourselves, as we embrace our joy, and as we strive to make the world a better, more welcoming place for our community.