In honor of Satisfaction Month, Atwood Journal has invited artists to take part in a collection of essays reflecting on id, music, tradition, inclusion, and extra.

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At the moment, LA-based singer/songwriter Donna Missal shares her essay, “What Queerness Means to Me,” a private reflection on the enduring presence of queerness all through her life, from childhood innocence and first like to the challenges confronted in a world that oscillates between acceptance and discrimination, finally highlighting the ability, resilience, and reality inherent in queerness, as part of Atwood Journal’s Satisfaction Month collection!

In the summertime of 2022, Donna Missal was disoriented to seek out herself residing out of her automotive and on associates’ couches in Los Angeles, questioning whether or not she may proceed – financially and emotionally – to make music. Up to now 5 years, she had collected tens of hundreds of thousands of streams throughout platforms, cultivated a passionate fan base for her heartfelt songwriting, performed festivals from Bonnaroo to Bottle Rock, and toured with high-profile artists together with Lewis Capaldi, CHVRCHES, and King Princess. Rolling Stone calls her music “gorgeous”, and Billboard has hailed her “drop kick of a vocal.” However nonetheless, Missal was struggling. Working by the ache, she discovered refuge within the artistic course of, digging deep into her beliefs about security and satisfaction.

Final 12 months, Missal shared on Twitter that she’d been let go on the finish of her four-year recording contract. “It’s emotionally exhausting to posture like all the pieces’s cool,” she wrote, of the “optics Olympics” that maintain artists from sharing their challenges overtly. Missal’s document deal had felt significant – it included sources, construction, and a set of individuals contractually obligated to imagine in her. With this barometer of self-worth eliminated, she was unmoored and devastated. Combating to handle her fundamental wants whereas nonetheless working within the studio with different artists, Missal gained a brand new consciousness of the tenuous nature of success within the music business.

Missal had began out as a songwriter and backing artist, collaborating with artists like Tinashe, Sharon Van Etten, Macklemore, and Lee Fields, and touchdown a publishing contract in her early 20s. After what The Guardian known as the “strident queer torch songs” of 2020s Lighter, Missal grew to become a sought-out vocalist, tapped to contribute a canopy of Cigarettes After Intercourse’s “Nothing’s Gonna Harm You Child” for the Oscar-winning movie Promising Younger Girl. Within the confines of the early pandemic, Missal dove into bed room pop recordings, utilizing her highly effective voice in a quieter method to keep away from disturbing her neighbors. She showcased this spare and horny homespun electronica on 2022’s within the mirror, within the evening EP, which was govt produced by Sega Bodega (FKA Twigs, Caroline Polachek).

To signify her journey by the final 12 months for the nightclub anthem “Flicker”, she enlisted choreographer Sadie Wilking to work along with her on a video centering Missal performing a fight dance sequence in a dirty warehouse. Missal didn’t need it to be horny. She wished it to seem like she was preventing for her life, and he or she skilled for months to manifest the sequence’s show of bodily energy. Sweaty and muscled, Missal’s visceral actions in “Flicker” distinction with the ethereal sounds of the tune. It embodies and completes her transformation.

Missal’s third studio album ‘Revel’ is out now through ADA Worldwide!

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“WHAT QUEERNESS MEANS TO ME”

by Donna Missal

Time strikes at an untouchable velocity.

Because it blurs on, the best way I see all the pieces round me is filtered by it. I used to be born in 1990, and rising up, bigotry and marginalization had been at a low crackling frequency. The hatred of queerness was an ambient noise in our tradition, similar to queerness itself needed to be. The harm and trauma the prior a long time had inflicted on queer folks appeared to trigger a flinching, silencing impact to the period I used to be raised in. My queerness was quietly buzzing like a distant and ever-present tune way back to my reminiscence can take me.

My first kiss was with my neighbor Erica, we had been 6 years outdated, beneath her blue plastic pool. I bear in mind it now in its gorgeous purity, the unquestioned expression of how a lot I cherished her. To be so unknowingly younger that pure expression is the one reality that exists in your whole, tiny universe. How unimaginable to consider now – earlier than some other consciousness has shaped, there may be love.

My queerness has been with me at all times.

Like a shadow, my truest type is printed when standing within the mild of the solar. I’ve by no means felt it was mine to cover, it by no means felt like mine. It at all times felt like me. It wasn’t one thing to run from, however to run with.

I fell in love with Amanda in highschool. Amanda made me my first mixtape. Amanda advised me she cherished me, and he or she did. My father noticed us wrestling within the entrance yard within the sticky summer season warmth, and Amanda wasn’t allowed to come back see me at dwelling anymore. My first reminiscence of disgrace seems like a cloud, blocking out the beaming mild of unflinching acceptance. Isn’t it superb how the burden of queerness is to like so radically, that when these closest to us gained’t perceive us, we stock that weight for the each of us? The hills that type when forgiveness isn’t reached by reconciliation; the deadlock of an limitless climb.

“Come exterior.”

Textual content message seems on my razor flip-phone at 12:01 am. Run from the door quick sufficient to overlook the sound of the glass and steel sealing shut behind me. The teal pickup truck ready for me with Amanda within the driver’s seat, Demise Cab for Cutie CD enjoying “in case you really feel embarrassed, I’ll be your delight. If you happen to want route, I’ll be your information.” Rebel barreled into the cracks of my heartbreak that shaped within the wake of my father’s quiet however thunderous disapproval. I broke aside.

Amanda broke with me and confirmed me how you can make one thing lovely out of the shattered items, collectively. The sensory reminiscence of the scent of Clinique pressed powder on her face and the way a lot I cherished it…similar to Amanda, I’ll always remember the entire queer love that has existed in my life. I’ve been so fortunate. At the moment, I see my lovely siblings develop into themselves and their queerness. I see my father’s embrace of this, and I really feel the disappointment held in my 16 12 months outdated physique soften away from me within the revelation that we evolve ceaselessly if we permit it. I’m so happy with them, I’m so happy with him, I’m so happy with myself for enduring the ache, for climbing the hill to allow them to run within the valley of acceptance.

The world of at present is so loud.

The quiet drone of the “don’t ask, don’t inform” technology has erupted like a geyser. The discrimination in opposition to a non-binary existence not hangs over us like a distant smog. It has stormed into our environment. It’s suffocating. It kills.

Nonetheless, just like the solar itself, queerness is elemental, essential, pure, radiant. To attempt to extinguish queerness is to wage conflict on nature itself. To just accept, to like, to stay freely, to not maintain questioning in your coronary heart, to listen to your self so clearly that the jeering rejection is only a whisper within the wind, that is what queerness means to me. Final energy, astonishing resilience, resounding reality. – Donna Missal

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