Wear it Like a Tattoo

From the Archives

Hello Beautifuls,

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I am still on vacation this week, so I’m serving up another archive, one that seems very fitting for the current moment.

Me and B in front of the iconic Austin graffiti sign. We took this today and it’s our first pic here!

Originally posted on March 26, 2024

I was out to dinner with a friend on Friday. It's warm here in Austin and I had on a short-sleeved shirt. She looked at my arm and then asked, "Did you always have that tattoo?"

I looked down for a moment and said, "Oh. Well. Yes." I'm surprised by the number of friends who ask me this. It's not a big tattoo, it sits almost in the crook of my left elbow, but it's not tiny either. I continued, "I got it in my mid twenties to remind me that when things go to shit, there's still a lot of love and compassion out there." The tattoo is a symbol that my sister and I made up to represent the idea of hope.

When I got the tattoo, I was really trying to get at the concept of love, but I wasn't there yet. Wasn't willing to admit that I was worthy of all the love in the universe. So I went with hope. Which seems fitting now. I hoped for so much back then, without the tools or enough understanding of myself to realize hope is a tricky mistress. But love, love is not. Love is the most solid thing there is. Hope is predicated on something changing, on experiencing an outcome that is different than the present. Love, on the other hand, doesn't need anything to be. Love already is. There is no outcome that makes love better, that validates it. Love doesn't need anything to change. Love is powerful right now.

I'm not trying to turn you off of hope or tell you you shouldn't have it. I'm just saying hope comes with strings attached.

Telling my friend the story around my hope tattoo got me thinking. I still like the message I was trying to send to my future self: When things look bleak, when you feel beaten down and unsure what to do next, remember that beautiful things have always come out of times when you thought you couldn't go on.

I'm reminded of something Suleika Jaouad said in a post last week about surviving cancer in her early 20s (and again recently, a full decade later) – that she wouldn't change the diagnosis, or the journey, the cancer took her on. That she'd do it over again for the lessons and the love that came out of the pain and fear and struggle.

In an interview with Susan Cain, she said, "I understand the skepticism. A month into my diagnosis, or even a year in, I wouldn’t have believed it. In fact, if you’d told me that one day I’d say, “I would not reverse my diagnosis,” I would’ve probably wanted to punch you in the face. When you’re in the trenches of something brutal, reversing course is all you want, and back then, all I wanted was to be a normal, healthy 22-year-old. But there’s a tremendous amount of power in accepting reality.

If it weren’t for my illness, I wouldn’t have had the deep conversations that can only take place when all the artifice is stripped away, when you are your most laid-bare, vulnerable self. I would have been charging forward, chasing some elusive, epic, mountain-top experiences, rather than relishing the small joys that surround us every day. Illness humbled and grounded me. It taught me all my most important lessons—about acceptance, about presence, about love—that I would never wish to unknow."

We humans are struggling with our own diagnoses right now, of illness and dis-ease on many levels. We are trying to find ways to get through when the going seems impossible, the stakes are bigger than they have ever been, and we are tired.

If I got a tattoo to help me get through this time, this now, what would it say? I would want it to remind me that when we are in the dark, there is always the option to turn on the light, whether it's a tiny flicker from a match or a 20-foot-wide searchlight.

A beautiful friend texted me the other night about my article from last week. She said she liked the piece, and that she’s, “not middle aged and rageful, but middle aged and anxious.”

We talked about why we are both anxious. If it was internally driven or externally influenced. We agreed it was probably both, and she used the word relentless. It reminded me of being in school, being snuck up on by my bully and being taunted and tormented, but never knowing when that was going to happen. It also reminded me of living with my dad, who could be charming and funny and playful and then in a split second turn vicious and raving.

There's a thing, I just learned, thanks to writer Christine Wolf, called hypervigilance. It's a coping behavior often adopted by the children of alcoholic parents. I have a feeling that many of us now, even those who had stable childhoods, have tipped over from general worry into a state of relentless hypervigilance.

Christine writes that, "According to a 2023 article published by The Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Susan Albers, PsyD, describes hypervigilance as a heightened state of awareness. 'It’s your brain’s way of protecting you by scanning the environment for signs of danger and being extremely aware of your surroundings,' she explained, and the manifestations can be mental and physical. Think of it as your gut instinct gone haywire.

'Hypervigilance is a basic human survival mechanism,' Dr. Albers continued. 'It allows us to sense predators and threats to our safety. But with hypervigilance, you feel like you’re constantly under threat.' The brain’s region for overseeing emotions — the amygdala — shifts into overdrive."

I'm not saying the horrible acts we are witnessing all over the world, and in our own backyards right now, have some sort of cosmic meaning or purpose. That we just need to bounce back and find the silver lining.

But I do believe that we can invite in grace, and there is always a way to find the light. That doesn't mean acceptance or forgiveness or surrender or even compassion.

It just means finding a tiny particle of something that feels one millimeter softer, brighter than where we are.

Sometimes this isn’t easy. Sometimes this isn’t even hard. Sometimes this feels fucking impossible. Even so. Even so. I know it to be the only answer, the antidote, to falling even further into anxiety, rage, darkness.

I remember discovering last fall that a bird had dropped a tomato seed in an empty pot and inside grew a tiny little tomato plant. I brought it in and nursed it for weeks and in mid-December, when the darkness was at its longest, I found myself eating sweet, bright, yellow, pear tomatoes. As if the universe were saying to me, “See, see? We told you magic is everywhere.”

Happy New Year. May we all be surprised by moments of magic and may we seek out the brightness in all the places. And perhaps, decide that we ourselves are the light.

With so much love,

xoxox

j