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Since December 2025, my mind and my hands have been occupied by a series of paintings that began pouring out of me. Each piece is a self portrait from around the ages of 9 to 16, after ideas about shame I had picked up at a Christian Youth Camp led me to start masking in response to trauma. I couldn't let my family know I was so badly flawed that even God wanted me to suffer, so I hid my feelings of helplessness, betrayal, isolation, horniness and gender. I dropped the Christian label when I was 12 or 13 but was already lost in a haze of maladaptive habits driving my thoughts, feelings and behaviors to escalate until they presented as a serious mood disorder I couldn't hide anymore. I feel lucky to have had resources facilitating my recovery and the construction of better habits and mindsets as an adult, but a sense of shame still resonates within me. It makes me scared and embarrassed to share this part of myself. But being able to express these ideas and emotions on my own terms feels empowering and cathartic in a way I've never experienced until now. The action of being materially constructive and forthcoming with the way I explore and express my feelings kills my shame by contradicting the idealist values that taught me shame in the first place. I combine the words Zazen and Zaza because it represents a kind of funny way I've leveraged the process of meditation and getting high to better employ techniques from Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy when my brain was too scattered and chaotic to otherwise function well. The limitaed color palette is in part due to working around my colorblindness.