“You Are Always Enough” Pride T-shirt Fundraiser
Sometimes the world changes us, and sometimes we change the world around us. Natalia Seth started changing her world through surrealistic photo compositions that turned into the wildly successful Instagram account Escaping Youth. Her work has now given her a social media platform to be able to help make things change for others. In honor of Pride Month, a month to celebrate those who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and more (LGBTQ+), she is running a t-shirt fundraiser to benefit The Trevor Project, an organization that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth.
“I’ve been following the Trevor Project for quite a while now,” says Natalia. “Their strides in helping the LGBTQ+ community has inspired me for quite some time. I believe encouragement and support from every side is important in creating a comfortable environment to express ourselves and love fully.”
Natalia began teaching herself photography at age 13. She soon learned Photoshop and moved on to manipulating her photos. She says, “I did everything in my power to teach myself how to take photos and use Photoshop, with YouTube as my ‘instructor’.” She began posting her creations to Instagram, and over the past six years, her account has attracted more than 230,000 fans.
If you scroll down to her early posts, you can see how Natalia, and her skills, have grown. She plays with color, light, and reality, often using herself as a subject. Some of her concepts are bright, while others show a darker side, but almost all of them are fantastical in some way. Her sense of wonder and imagination makes for an arresting spread of photos. This work has spawned a book The Imaginary World of Natalia Seth and work with companies like Adobe and Coca-Cola.
An early post from Natalia’s account.
Natalia says that she got her inspiration for the design for her t-shirt fundraiser from “key elements in the Trevor Project’s mission: Self-love and pride!” She goes on, “I derived inspiration from the significance of the pride rainbow, and surrounded the design with words of encouragement, or reminders, of self-worth. In the middle is a face which represents you, the person wearing the shirt.” On her fundraising page, she writes, “No matter what you’re going through, no matter what anyone says, you have your own standards of yourself. You paint your own colors and create your own story. The person you are is the person you’re meant to be. You are enough.”
Natalia’s t-shirt designs for her fundraiser.
The biggest message she wants to impart to others is “Just to remember to spread love to yourself and others.”
Natalia’s chosen charity, The Trevor Project, is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning (LGBTQ) young people under 25.
Miellyn is the Director of Marketing Content at Custom Ink. Her work has spanned marketing for television networks like TLC and Travel, educational content for Smithsonian and National Geographic, marketing and story for indie video games, essays for publishers including Random House, The Telegraph, and Smart Pop Books, and stories for press outlets like VICE and VH1.
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