📎 SENZA SILVERSTEIN 📎

WEREWOLF/SNOW LEOPARD & WOLF

NON-BINARY

SHE/THEY

21

ASSIGNED ALBUM

CELESTIAL BODY

by Senza

TRIVIA

- 5'7" and bisexual.

- July 7th

-  Would never, ever, ever be intentionally rude, but is absolutely TERRIBLE with social cues and remembering not to interrupt people or swear freely in public/in front of children.  They phrase things strangely and ask questions or make comments that they don't realize aren't okay to say aloud, sometimes (especially if the comment is conditionally acceptable to make).  She is curious and generous, giving compliments and asking questions freely, but these behaviors can make her come off as flirtatious and/or challenging the other person's perspective, respectively.  She is not dismissive, or the type of person to ask others to justify their beliefs, but she's bad at using her tone and words to make it clear that she's just trying to learn more--not calling you wrong.  For instance, if she's surprised and impressed by something someone has told her, she'll ask questions like "are you sure" and "how do you know" instead of saying, "wow, you're really knowledgeable about this.  Can you explain it to me?"  They are trusting and like listening to people share their expertise, but their openness to that is not always apparent.  People have to just get to know them and trust their heart over their tone, or even their words (which is easy once you've been around them for a while!  They're very thoughtful and generous--just an overall gentle, good person).

- Not hyperactive, but more excitable than they look.  They come off as very mellow, and they are gentle and easygoing, but they get very excited to talk about their interests and listen to other people talk about their own specialties.  She can speak a little bit too fast sometimes; her voice is quiet (she can be hard to hear sometimes, and she tends to raise her voice when asked to speak up… only to forget and start mumbling again a few sentences later) and quick, and when she’s excited, her speech can be disjointed and a liiiiittle hard to follow sometimes, because she trips over her words and leaps from topic to topic in an attempt to get everything going on in her head out of her mouth.  She stops and starts while speaking a LOT to give herself time to figure out how she wants to word something, because if she doesn’t, she’ll stumble through an explanation of the topics she really wants to talk about properly.  

- Music and fashion are their primary interests (though they’re really more like obsessions and lifestyles), with fashion design and its overlap with DIY culture being Senza’s reason for living.  They love self-expression and could rave about the history of different alternative fashion styles and their associated movements, musical genres, and ideologies for hours and hours, but they also grew up exposed to mainstream fashion juggernauts and still keep up with the luxury and high fashion industries to this day.  They know the names and stories of so many designers and clothing lines, and they’re happy to rattle them off to anyone who will listen.

- Always carries her sewing kit with her, and loves making and customizing clothes.  She goes thrifting all the time, seeing the potential in everything she comes across and turning scrap pieces of fabric into the bases for works of art ranging from simply cool and well-designed to weird, bold, and experimental.  She will turn anything into clothes, and a lot of her pieces aren’t functional for everyday wear, but that doesn’t stop her.  She’ll sew anything onto anything, and she embroiders and paints onto whatever she can find.  Her more out-there outfits definitely turn heads.  Some of her favorites are her bottle cap skirt, her handbag decorated with playing cards and adorned with a handle made of repurposed and chained together silverware, and her jacket absolutely covered in keys, wristwatches, buttons, and pieces of broken CDs.

- Loves installation art, experimental music and fashion, and history and art museums.  

- They play the piano, pan flute, trombone, guitar, and violin.

- An incredible vocalist.  Their singing voice is nothing short of beautiful; crystal clear with an unbelievable upper range.  She’s naturally gifted, but also has been taking lessons since she was a kid, and the combination of talent and hard work make her vocal performances hauntingly beautiful.  She’s got an impressive handle over heavy vocals, but her clean vocals are where she SHINES.  She can maneuver between notes very quickly, and dip smoothly in and out of her head and chest voice.  She’s mostly a soprano, and her whistle notes are out of this world.  Her voice has been one of the key parts of her identity for as long as she can remember, and she takes caring for it, honing it, and loving it very, very seriously.  It makes her so HAPPY to sing, and music just melts the rest of the world away, sending her into what feels like a Trance.  She often can’t help but start smiling when she sings; it’s like a high for her.  She would sooner die than give it up.  

- In a DIY experimental screamo band with Kit and Ginger!  She takes a lot of influence from slow, heavy, atmospheric metal music, as well as jazz, industrial metal, and progressive metalcore.  Screamo is the base of her band’s work, but they make FULL use of the “experimental” label too, using their music as a place to explore and play with all sorts of sounds.  They use songwriting to meditate on their love of noise, which includes music, but also includes everything else!  They get entranced by the way a voice echoes out in a cave, the sound of howling coyotes in the night, the way old house keys clink together in a hand followed by the deep click of a heavy wooden door being unlocked, and the beautiful ambience of a damper pedal being depressed by a pianist. It’s not uncommon for their music to feature a mix of heavy and clean vocals, and they like to use Senza’s voice to experiment with different sounds.  They often take inspiration from various instruments, languages and cultures, and especially bird calls when it comes to her high vocals, and the result is a unique, atmospheric, and complex take on a genre they love.

- Honestly, a pretty weird person!  Mostly in a good way; they’ve been collecting coins, marbles, rocks, bottle caps, receipts, feathers, can tabs, and keys since they were little, and they sometimes use pieces from their collections in their projects! They also like picking up dominos and dice when they can find them, but don’t quite collect them. They have lots of little quirks, rituals, and mannerisms, with the most distinctive one being a specific whistle and click sound they make to stim (it sounds almost like a slide whistle followed by a “pop” or a snapping noise).  Their poor social skills and nonstandard interests and mannerisms make them come off as strange, but they’re really cool and so SMART.  Anyone who’s fine with them getting easily distracted and lost in thought will find themselves grateful that they were patient enough to hear what she had to say.

- Suffers from intense, intense chronic pain.  Treatment has helped them a little bit, but has been mostly unsuccessful.  Their pain ranges from ignorable to debilitating, with some days being mostly fine and some days requiring them to stay home and lie as still as possible on their bed until the pain recedes.  The pain is particularly bad in their hands, wrists, and forearms, which can make sewing and playing their instruments quite difficult.  There are times where the toll it takes on them and their ability to partake in their interests sends them into the occasional depressive episode.  They are not a generally negative person, but there are times when they grieve their inability to live a normal, pain free life.  Sometimes they feel utterly helpless about it.

- Senza’s relationship with their body is complicated.  If they’re honest about it (which they don’t like being), they have very, very bad gender dysphoria, but they feel Stuck in terms of physically transitioning.  On one hand, they know they feel like they need to go on testosterone (they are SO dysphoric, and it helps that HRT might have a chance to make their physical pain a little more bearable), but on the other hand, they are familiar with their body and scared of pushing it “too far.”  They know they can’t pick and choose the changes they’d get on testosterone, and so they fear over-masculinizing themselves and “overshooting” the comfortable zone they’re yearning for.  They are afraid they won’t feel beautiful anymore, and that they won’t recognize themselves, and they lean hard on fashion to help express themselves in the absence of gender affirming care.  Their biggest fear surrounding HRT is losing their voice.  They feel incredibly torn.  They know that testosterone would give them so, so much, and their friends and family are starting to get concerned with the degree to which it’s obvious that they really NEED to medically transition, but they Can Not Lose Their Voice.  The thought of having to at MINIMUM adjust to a lower register and re-learn their voice (especially after waiting through the process of it dropping and being scratchy and unsteady) feels like the threat of having to Re-Learn Who They Are, and they struggle to envision a future for themselves in the worst case scenario where their voice is too “broken” to use anymore, and they feel like they just Can’t Sing At All.  They are so scared of moving forward, and they spend a lot of time trying to ignore the fact that they simply cannot stay where they are indefinitely.  The turmoil they’re going through will catch up to them if they don’t make the hard decision, and they’re miserable knowing deep down that this will not just go away and stop haunting them if they don’t do something about it.

- Loves screamo and metal (when it comes to metal they gravitate most towards atmospheric, slow, heavy stuff, but they love basically every subgenre and aren't that picky).  Senza is curious about basically any music that's new to them and will happily listen to any recommendations.  Their taste is relatively diverse, even if they do have their favorites.  

- Their favorite bands and artists are, in no particular order, Senza (yes, they named themselves after a band <3), The Names of Our Friends, Sesame, I Hate Sex, andthecanaryfell, xElegyx, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, Regina Spektor, Pains, Raster Density, Evanescence, and Stygian.

- Her parents are both werewolves; her mother is part wolf and part snow leopard, and her father is mostly a housecat!  Clearly, for Senza, one side presents much more intensely than the other -w-  Her coloration and some of her anatomy are definitely influenced by both parents, but she is for all intents and purposes a wolf/snow leopard werewolf, like her mother!

- Attica is her half sister!  Their dad's relationship with Attica's mother fell apart shortly after she was born, and they shared custody of her during her childhood.  Senza's birth was unexpected, but welcome by both of her parents, and Senza's mother and father married a few years after she was born (a marriage that is still happy and healthy to this day).  There was some tension and drama during the kids' childhoods, but the adults did their best to ensure that they grew up close and never resented one another, which both siblings are grateful for.  As an adult, Attica is now close with her father and stepmother, and Attica's mother has nothing but love for Senza--they have something like an aunt and niece relationship.  The children have always come first, and all involved adults are fiercely protective of, proud of, and loving towards both siblings.

- Friends with Swish, Harriet, Poppy, and Georgie!

- Good friends with Attica, Violet, Isola, and Oreo!

- Their ears droop sort of down and to the sides; they rarely hold them upright/erect.  Their eyes are blue with pale slit pupils.

- She came to me in a dream...