until only the breadcrumbs remain....

As a teenager, I was subjected to conversion therapy twice, a pseudoscientific and coercive practice enforced by families and religious institutions to suppress or alter sexual orientation or gender identity. The experiences were violent enough that my mind did what it was designed to do when survival is at stake: it sealed them away. Large portions of my adolescence became inaccessible. What remained were gaps, distortions, and fragments. The absence itself became evidence of harm. What I was left with were breadcrumbs: partial facts without sequence or sensation. I knew certain events had occurred, such as my first kiss in the back corner of a library, but I could not place them in time or recover their sensations. It was as if they were in black and white.

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Working with a therapist, I began attempting to retrieve what had been buried. Memory returned through intentional reflection and a form of archival research on myself. I used digital ephemera from unexpected places: search histories, metadata, forgotten messages, archived posts. Services such as Google preserve an astonishing amount of personal residue. I used this data to reconstruct timelines, cross-checking dates against photographs and social media messages. Each time a memory broke through, it arrived with a crash. I wrote it down immediately, before it could retreat again.

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These texts were later printed onto vellum using an inkjet printer. Because ink dries slowly on this surface, the words remained unfixed for a time. I smeared, obscured, and partially erased passages I was not yet capable of confronting. The pages record both what was remembered and what could not be endured. Approximately seventy sheets were produced. They were then crumpled, folded, and twisted, not to destroy them, but to mirror the condition of the archive they represented. The pages were placed without order inside an acid-free archival box.

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The box was positioned on an end table beside a green armchair. Also on the table was a bottle of Rush brand poppers. While commonly associated with gay sex, it functioned here as a tool for memory access. The altered state produced by amyl nitrates allowed me to step partially outside my body. This distance was not escapism. It was protection. It made it possible to re-enter experiences that had once been too dangerous to remember.

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In front of the seating area played a forty-foot video collage composed of personal digital material including: music videos that shaped my teenage years; a photograph of my grandmother and me before I secretly attended prom with a boy; a letter from my mother’s church denying that it ever performed conversion therapy on me; a screenshot of the Facebook post I made when I came out at twelve years old. The video was accompanied by a playlist I assembled at fourteen, music that once provided escape.

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Viewers were given no instructions for how to navigate or reassemble the material. The installation was encountered in fragments, mirroring the way the memories themselves were recovered. The vellum pages cross-referenced one another and the projected imagery, but meaning remained unstable and incomplete. As viewers handled the pages, they tore and disintegrated. Each act of touch enacted further loss. What remained were only traces. Breadcrumbs.