I Made A Zine To Remember The Old Me

Four years ago was the first time I got crafty with my emotions as an intentional healing practice. I created a childhood trauma collage and fondly called it my trauma-lage. Although I disposed of that first therapeutic collage, the practice stuck with me.

Fast forward to February 2025. I desperately needed to grab some scissors, markers, and paper to get all of my emotions out. I made a zine (classic cut-and-paste style) to grieve pandemic-induced losses. To process the end of a relationship. To reconcile who I had been before my baby with who I wanted to be as a single mother.

Looking Back a Year Later

A year after making this zine, I can say it has served its purpose wonderfully. Now, when I think about those cringey or depressing moments, I think of this zine instead and how it made me feel when I finished creating it.

I sometimes catch myself thinking: Was that even real? How was that me? How can time fly by like that?! I feel so disconnected from my past—who I used to be and the choices I made. But at the same time, I understand that everything I now feel disconnected from had to happen for me to be who I am today.

What I Gained From This Process:

• A way to process grief and complex emotions when other ways wouldn't work
• Distance from painful memories—now I remember the healing act of making the zine instead of the pain itself
• Confirmation that my feelings deserve creative attention and it's not just a warm fuzzy practice my therapist suggests
• A tangible marker for an important turning point in my life

Sharing It

Unlike my first trauma collage, I wanted to share this zine with people as part of my letting go practice. When I showed it to my mom, she surprised me. She said she really liked that I could express myself in this way.

I don't usually feel the need to share things with my mother, we have very different opinions about how my life should be. So to see her actually sit down and read a zine that I made with very personal stuff was a little... Uncomfortable.

But it was a nice way to practice sharing my experiences and creativity with others.

Then the zine sat untouched for almost a year.

During that year, I had occasional therapy sessions to help me let go of the negative emotions and memories of traumatic experiences. I finally reached a place where I could live my life without those things from my past haunting me every night.

I didn't get the zine out again until December 2025 when I was finally ready to make the words and memories visible. To honor my story and move forward without the stuff in the zine holding me back.

Authors Note

December 4, 2025

The title of this conceptual zine is Place: Still There Time: Long Gone, and a fitting subtitle would be No Regreso, or I Am Never Coming Back. The memories held within these pages have reached their final resting place. This zine is the urn in which their ashes will remain - remembered, but no longer alive.

Take the back cover, for example. It shows a photo of me in Argentina in December 2019, with long black hair and a cheap cigarette in my hand. That version of me is definitely not coming back. She belongs to the past - with the memory of the Drunken Fry, a beloved punk bar that, much like her, is never returning.

Someday I may return to these places, but as a different version of myself, a version that might not even exist yet. Who knows? I have the freedom to change and grow as needed, or simply as desired. That is the beauty of life: we don’t have to be the same person forever.

This is her story, and as Bad Bunny said, debí tirar más fotos.

I hope I don't need to process more traumatic events in the future... If I do, I can guarantee that it will eventually turn into a perzine.

Thanks for being here,

-Kylie

A Question to Contemplate

Is there a version of yourself that you no longer feel connected to? Did you (or do you need to) do something intentional to let go of the "what could have been" to make room for what could be?