You Are Not Yours

“Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.” A sentence repeated so often it stops sounding like faith and starts sounding like a lock. From it, rules multiply: what you can desire, what you can touch, what you can admit to yourself, what must remain unsaid. The body is framed as evidence, something to be inspected, corrected, kept “clean,” kept useful for someone else’s idea of holiness.
In that logic, the body becomes a loaned container, a borrowed vessel: you are told to preserve it, to return it untouched, unchanged, obedient. Not only your actions are judged, but your hunger, your softness, your curiosity—your very becoming. Ownership disappears quietly: you live inside your own skin as a quest. A guest in a rented body.

This series of woodcuts, made after my coming out and leaving the church, refuses that arrangement. It marks the moment I stopped negotiating with a power that had claimed my body for my whole life, and began to take it back.