Steph Bruzon

Recent Posts

  • HOW TO VOTE

    1. Register to vote, if you haven’t already. You can do this from your bed. Registration is the easiest part of voting. Do it now, and next time you can show up!
    2. DO YOUR RESEARCH. Know who and what is on your ballot. It should only take you a moment to do this. Please show up prepared. An uneducated vote is just as bad as no vote. And we have every resource we need at our fingertips, which means that there is no excuse for ignorance when people’s lives are at stake.
    3. Now that you’ve fed yourself some knowledge, find your polling place! There are many sites that can tell you this info. Here’s one of them: https://www.vote.org/polling-place-locator/
    4. Get up from your bed, dress that human suit, and GO VOTE.

    If you need help with any of these steps, reach out! I am here for you, as are many others. You will feel so good walking out of that polling place knowing that you used your voice.

    NOW LET’S TALK…

    I don’t want to spout some “liberal” stuff at you because I don’t care for the label “liberal” anyway. I’m a human being who cares about other human beings. That’s it. I want to encourage voting for candidates who care about human rights.

    It’s easy to forget that the most important thing we have in this world is not money but each other. Ok, you can provide me financial stability! great! but can you fight for my rights and the rights of others? No? Then you lose my vote. Simple as that.

    Earlier this year, we faced abortion bans that have brought us back so far I’m terrified for the future of women. When I found out that Roe v. Wade was overturned, I spent weeks in bed crying, researching, writing, trying to make sense of things. This is an irreversible hurt. I will never stop hurting for myself and for the women in this world. How could this happen?

    And I’ll admit, I haven’t done all that I can about it. I vote. I’m voting tomorrow. I speak out about hate. I research all that I can so I can provide facts to those less educated on the subject. I identify my own biases, my own ignorance. But I haven’t done all that I can about it. It’s easy to forget what’s going on in the world when it doesn’t directly affect you. Even though the bans technically do directly affect me, I’m not pregnant right now and unable to get an abortion, so I’m able to ignore it, to live a life where those bans never happened.

    When something is happening in real time, when the news articles come out and everyone’s posting about it, it’s fresh in your mind. You feel the anger & intensity of it. But eventually, that intensity fades & we move on. Some people move on for comfort, some because it is too painful to linger there. Same thing happened with the BLM movement. So much hurt in the moment, and yet so much silence after.

    I don’t want to move on. I don’t want to remain silent. I want to use every moment I can to help, to remain aware of what’s happening because if it’s happening to another human being–it’s happening to me.

    It’s happening to all of us. Or are we that unbothered by the abuse of others? or are we that unconcerned with the wellbeing of the people we share this life with?

     In Florida, on July 1st, a law banning abortions after 15 weeks took effect. It’s happening here, too. This isn’t an Atwood novel, though it might seem like it! (that woman is psychic). This is real life, and it’s happening right in front of us.

    And yeah, these things can be discouraging for voters. It might feel pointless to vote when at the end of the day, things like these happen. But this logic is flawed! Apply it to anything else and see. Just because your art might not make you money, are you going to stop making it? No. Just because loving someone might end up breaking your heart, are you going to stop loving? No. One day we’ll all die, so does that mean we should quit living? No.

    Voting is a privilege. People fought for our right to vote. It takes a few hours (or less) of your time to register, research, and show up. PLEASE don’t take it for granted.

    My parents were born in Cuba, where they spent half of their lives silenced by those in power. Voting was hardly a concept, never mind free speech. Speaking up meant risking their lives.

    We’re much luckier than a lot of the population.

    So protect others as you would protect yourself. If you’re able to have a voice, use it. If not for yourself, do it for others. Even if you think it’s meaningless to vote, even if you think it makes no difference, even if you’re not a woman, even if you’re not black, latino, gay, VOTE AS IF YOU WERE.

    Vote as if your life depended on things changing

    because ours does–

    and thus yours should, too.

  • A Love Poem

    VOWS

    by Stephanie Bruzon

    for B

    this is the part where the mystique dries up 

    and turns to mold.

    /

    this is the part where furniture imprints

    on naked skin,

    and shoes are put to dry

    in the sun.

    /

    where it matters not 

    that something is happy,

    where it matters only 

    that it is alive.

    /

    this is the nonsensical

    chapter,

    the

    “I want to write happier”

    the skin

    to the tumor

    to the body

    that is blue.

    /

    you dig my illness

    a grave to lie in;

    I keep its death

    close to my chest:

    a vow of gratefulness

    to you.

    /

    a single vow of 

    I do,

    I do give it 

    now

    instead of take it.

    /

    and then I lie about it

    when it becomes exposed again

    and let my bare legs

    swing back and forth 

    over it,

    /

    lest I take myself

    into that winter 

    I know that I will 

    never come back from.

    /

    and you might say something like

    “But you love Billie Holiday!”

    and I’ll say

    that jazz makes me 

    wish I could scream louder than I do.

    /

    something about the color blue again

    something like

    I’m almost almost

    almost

    blue.

    /

    and you,

    you might say

    “this is the only life in which you have

    come out of the other end alive,

    alive

    and on fire” 

    /

    and I might say

    this is the only life,

    there is no other.

    then make a vow to the end,

    /

    a vow that won’t end.

    /

    and you might say

    beautiful things,

    and I might say ugly ones,

    /

    and we might live

    to say them both 

    /

    again

    and again.

  • *Life as a young artist

    *creative liberation, creative blocks, thoughts of failure, the meaning of success, ,uncertainty, fate, a change of plans.

    still from my debut short film I Didn’t Do It

    Art has followed me for as long as I can remember. It is the lover that comes in though my window at midnight. It is the baby that whines all night in the crib until I put it in my arms and sing it to sleep. I can’t choose something else, even if I wanted to. That’s the thing: art is like a seed inside each of us. Within most, that seed lays dormant and sprouts every once in a while when asked. Within artists, that seed rages, unasked, untamed.

    As a little girl, It first manifested as a love of reading and writing. I learned English my first year of grade school, and I quickly became the best reader in the class. Nothing excited me more than walking around the library in my school. Nothing inspired me more than those three books I could check out every visit.

    Come middle school, It rushed right out of me and grew into journal entries and monologues and scenes. Those were the worst years of my life so far, and my love of art got me through it. As a young artist, you constantly feel like you’re born wrong. It’s like everyone around you has substance inside of them whereas you only have a void. Art fills that void, but you haven’t learned that yet, so you just feel aimless. You try to pretend other things interest you, too, so you can fit in with everyone else. You pretend and pretend and pretend until you can’t anymore.

    My whole life I had gone to “normal” schools. Come high school, I decided to go to an art school. I spent four years surrounded by the most creative minds around and made films, started a poetry club (one of the most rewarding projects of my life), wrote and directed my own theatre show, and got to constantly nurture that seed. I no longer felt the void as much because it was filled with love, with creativity.

    Then, I graduated high school in true oldest-child-in-need-of-validation fashion: with an IB diploma and a strong GPA. I was headed to SCAD in Savannah, Georgia. I was leaving my home state, finally. While my dad drove, I sat in the backseat with my acoustic guitar uncomfortably jammed in between my sister and I.

    But I didn’t know if I would be staying in Georgia. I didn’t know if I could afford SCAD. My parents couldn’t make me any promises as far as funding went. I was going to study performing arts; what if I started a career based in uncertainty with tons of debt?

    So, I met with the financial aid office and decided to put a wait on my decision (extend my application through the fall term to the winter term). But I’m not sure it’s worth the debt to put myself through the educational system again.

    I felt immense shame coming back home though. As an artist, a fear of failure constantly lingers over your mind. You’re told that your path is unstable, among other things. We grow up feeling alienated. We finally find the thing that makes us feel like our authentic selves. And then we make other plans for it because others tells us that it’s not practical.

    We make plans for ourselves. We set standards and tell ourselves that we’ll get somewhere if we just get in line. We try to make sense of the gift, but the best part of the gift is that it makes no sense. Originally, I didn’t want to go to college, but I made myself pick a pretty plan that would make my life as a young artist into something digestible.

    But the truth is that life is not going to be simple. Life as an artist especially won’t be simple. It’ll take the kind of self-evaluation that most people can’t even imagine undertaking. It’ll take guts and an abundance of patience and love for the craft. I’m not going to wake up with everything I want–and why would I want that anyway? I love the process, the in-between: staying up all night because my soul has things to say, creating poem after poem, song after song, film after film, and never expecting anything out of it because expecting is not the point.

    And this strange and often frustrating in-between is often where the true living happens to us. And the art follows the living and vice versa.

    People will tell you that you have to make it big to be a big deal. Nothing about that statement is true.

    Who I am, who we are, despite what society tells us, is a big fucking deal.

    And I might still go to school eventually. I still want to make my Cuban family proud with the diploma that they could never get for themselves.

    But I’m not going to be a doctor. I won’t sit at a desk all day. The seed won’t let me. It rages, still.

    And I’m not going to do anything just to check some boxes, especially when they’re not even my own boxes to begin with.

    This is life as a young artist. You break more than your peers do. You have to come to terms with the fact that your path is vastly different than the path of those around you (and this is true for everyone, not just artists). But especially for us, things will be up in the air all of the time.

    Remember: others can’t see the seed unless you show it to them. When you’re still young and exploring, it’s all about trusting yourself enough to commit to it and watch it grow. In the end, we have no choice but to let the art keep speaking lest we wish to deprive ourselves of one of the most beautiful things in this life (how lucky are we to be the called ones?)

    Earlier this year, I had the kind of intense mental breakdown I used to have in middle school almost daily. It hadn’t happened in a while, not to that degree. I had to seek medical help for myself. After I was feeling better, I got calls from my family members every day.

    On one of those phone calls, a family member told me that I should “maybe take a break from the art thing.” They had good intentions, but my face heated up fast. They figured the art was somehow the root of all my distress. They couldn’t see how art had saved me. They even referenced famous artists and their tragic lives and deaths as reasons why I should stop.

    “People who make art go crazy,” they said.

    “If I stop making art, I’ll die,” I responded and hung up the phone.

    MORE STUFF

    some songs for you: