ABOUT

In Shoot Me, I confront the brutal emotional residue left behind by online comment threads—those shadow spaces where cruelty hides behind anonymity. This piece was born from the heartbreak I felt reading the vicious responses to the 2016 Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, a tragedy that took the lives of artists, dreamers, and chosen family—many from my own community.

As a Latina immigrant woman, I know what it means to live in a body that is both politicized and invisibilized. In the digital world, that body is often stripped of context and reduced to a target. With this piece, I offer my own image to the line of fire—not in surrender, but in confrontation.

The repetition of “Shoot Me” speaks to how easily we become disposable in both discourse and policy. It’s a meditation on digital violence and its real-world consequences, and a provocation: What does it mean to “shoot back” when the weapon is language, and the battlefield is virtual?

Shoot Me is not an act of martyrdom. It is an invitation to bear witness. To feel. To choose love, not passivity. To reclaim our narratives—fiercely, vulnerably, unapologetically.

It is also an invitation to observe the observers: to witness how audiences engage with an image they are allowed to interact with—without consequence. This is a piece that gives permission to “shoot” without fear of repercussion, and in doing so, it asks: What do we become when violence is safe, detached, and abstracted?