“Che’Li is the life-performance embodiment project ritualizing consciousness and shaping change at the intersections of beauty, absurdity, and sensuality. My craft is an extension of Kapwa, The Shared Self—it is how I stim, co-regulate, incarnate, and transform. It is how I may imagine myself without shame. My lived experience as a Queer and Disabled CHamPinoy healing artist invites me to embody the questions: What is the difference between performativity and performance in the body? How may we engage with trauma without re-traumatizing ourselves? Why do we need artists now, yesterday, forever? These wonderings, dynamic in their inquiries, insist just how possible my healing is when I choose a creative livelihood that is justice-oriented, trauma-informed, self-determined, and love-based. Still, the gap between my experience and my expression is wide, long, and deep. Sometimes, that gap aches like a wound—severed flesh desperately reaching for itself, trying to re-member itself pre-trauma. Sometimes, that gap beckons like a portal—possibility calling through each membrane as I make out the sound of my own voice. Most times, it’s both, it’s beyond, and in-between. I belong in those gaps, with/in all its perilous glory. As I develop my attraction to the unknown, there is as much to share as there is to learn. I welcome us into this draft of art as accountability structure; as experimental prayer; as love language and liberation technology. Heal or perish, baby!”