Hi Zee,
It’s me, Zee. I know this sounds weird but I’m talking to you from the future. It’s 2019 and it’s all getting a bit weird up in here. The host of the celebrity apprentice is President and the U.K. is now being ran by a group calling themselves The Grand Wizards. The most popular music is Mumble rap, and there’s a TV show where Reggie Yates sets attack dogs on celebrities. But stay with me, because even though this all sounds alien, the future is a beautiful place.
Right now that spare bedroom at your Nan’s house is feeling like a prison, but it won’t last a life time. You don’t have a word for it right now, but your gender, your sexuality, it is all human, it is all honest, real, naive and beautiful.
You’ll love a boy and he’ll break your heart, you’ll run away to China and go to university. You’ll do drugs you shouldn’t and not eat when you should have. You’ll lose weeks at a time and drop out of uni early. You’ll have a bad relationship with a girl and a worse one with yourself. You’ll stop playing music while you beat yourself up. There will be a few points in the next few years where this rollercoaster is too much you’ll try anything to make it stop. Eventually you’ll be glad it didn’t. Don’t take that permanent solution to a temporary problem. Because you don’t realise how close you are to the greatest things at times.
Slowly, gradually, you’ll put the jigsaw of our mind together and one day, you’ll pick up a guitar and play your first show as Queen Zee.
It will become an identity that will shape you, a vehicle for your expression. You’ll fall in love with coffee, weed and wine and travel the world tasting them all. Sexuality and gender will blur, and one day, it will click.
You’re Queen Zee, that’s it. That’s all, and that’s fine.
You don’t need to define yourself, prove yourself or label it.
A bearded woman, a bent punk, a transsexual existential crisis, a love story, a cliche, a hypocrite, a human, sometimes alien, sometimes a freak, sometimes bored and sometimes boring.
You are not defined by anything other than yourself, you were born limitless in a world that is limited. You can be anything, or nothing, that isn’t what is important. It’s what you do with that being. Take this brief and fleeting moment, and ride it as hard as you can. You’ll have scars from the chaotic shows, chipped teeth and broken noses. You’ll meet your idols, and realise they’re as boring as you are. You’ll meet your enemies and realise maybe you’re the ass hole. Just live it, live hard and fast and free and live on stage.
That spare bedroom isn’t a prison cell it’s a battery in charge. It’s potential energy. And in a few years you will plug into your best friends and touch the lives of thousands of people in a way you will never be able to understand but love regardless. But until you can do that you need this time right now to figure your own mind out.
Don’t get sad, get angry.
Zee x
