Commitment
I think one of the most important decisions that I have made in my life so far was the decision to get a tattoo. Sure, the timing and reasons for getting one might seem a bit questionable but I find it hard to believe that I will ever come to regret the decision to follow through. The months (maybe years) leading up to January 21st, 2017 were some of the hardest, most isolating, and darkest I’ve experienced.
Let me take a moment to qualify this—I lead an extremely comfortable, supported, and mostly-healthy life. I have no physical disabilities and a good degree of confidence in my self-awareness and ability to evaluate my own mental health. I have never experienced any lows that significantly impacted my day-to-day life.
Nonetheless, I believe parts of me irreversibly changed during the time leading up to my decision to get a tattoo and in the time shortly after. In general, I think my post-graduate life can be split up into three periods:
- Pre-Florida
- Florida
- Post-tattoo
So, obviously my message here is to never live in Florida unless you want to experience some sort of life-changing crisis. Jokes aside, (South) Florida is a beautiful, sunny place where the majority of my extended family lives. I will forever be grateful for the time I was able to spend with them there, even though I now feel like I have a better understanding why we didn’t visit them so much during my childhood.
For me, though, Florida was a place I moved to in order to further my career—a choice I still standby today, and definitely don’t regret, but one with some unexpected consequences. I knew moving to Florida would be somewhat risky. I had no friends there, I was taking a job with a company where few were under the age of 30, and I am completely incapable of tolerating heat and humidity.
It was exciting, it was new, and more importantly it was something different. I’m a huge fan of “going big or going home” when it comes to making changes in my life. I’m generally a habitual person, so whenever I do shake things up it tends to be pretty dramatic. Mostly I think I am this way because the bigger the change, the harder it is for me to go back on it. If I have an option to be cautious while still making a change, I’ll take it. This tends to lead to a lack of commitment with most of the little changes I try to make in my life like eating more vegetables, or exercising regularly, or going vegan, or writing a blog.
So, I make up for that by hardcore committing to really significant things like getting a non-cage/bowl-dwelling pet or taking that job offer. But most of these big changes are ones I know would be supported by my friends and family and that seem somehow objectively the “right” choice. When it comes to decisions that might seem in the slightest bit unconventional, I get cold feet.
It wasn’t until leaving my friends in the Northeast, moving to Florida, and meeting zero non-family people under 30 (which at 24 somehow seemed so far off in a way it doesn’t seem at nearly 27) that I would have ever seriously considered and eventually committed to getting a tattoo.
I spent 21 months in the middle-of-nowhere, suburbs of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The only thing I could walk to was Publix. Despite being only ten miles away from the beach, it was a 30+ minute drive on a good day (another reason I chose not to live closer to the “city”). The sunny days during my first winter somehow became unbearable during my second. Rather than lifting me up, each day over 50*F pushed me down with the same oppressiveness as the wave of heat you feel walking out of an air-conditioned mall in the summer.
Getting a cat certainly helped me feel less isolated at home, but as the months went on the positive social interactions I had at work and with my family stopped being enough. I tried to explore my creative side with adult coloring books and journaling. I actually exercised in the morning (for about three months). I finally got an Instagram account. I planned a trip to Croatia with my best friends from college.
And I learned that one of these friends had went and gotten two tattoos without telling us. I always found tattoos beautiful (in moderation) and hearing her describe why she got them and the meaning behind them moved me unexpectedly. Around this time I started thinking about what I would want to get if I ever got a tattoo—it needed to be something personal, meaningful, but still objectively nice and in the style I preferred (Instagram was great for exploring different artists).
Sometimes I wonder if I would have gotten over that slump and learned to love Florida with the same intensity of a golf-loving, geriatric retiree. But, as it happened, I got a job back in the Northeast (although a little farther north) and leapt at the chance to do something, anything, to leave. I mostly put the idea of getting a tattoo out of my mind but it had stuck with me in a way that moderately risky, body modifications never had before.
Once I was back in the Northeast, I started looking for artists specifically from there but without any real sense of when or if I would truly commit. I had work, friends, and learning a new city to worry about and like, tattoos are forever and I was questioning whether or not a tattoo was “really me” in the first place. But a few months into living in my new city, I had less work (consulting is weird), fewer socializing opportunities (grad students don’t have free time, it turns out), and less courage to explore in the freezing cold than I had anticipated.
When I wasn’t actively looking for a project or trying to complete one of the company’s free online learning courses, I was practically having an out-of-body experience. I didn’t feel like myself, I was questioning my direction in life, and I felt utterly incapable of doing anything to change that in a way that was completely foreign to me. I have always felt sure that I could make the best out of any situation and to feel like this after making a big change was a let down. Moving out of Florida was meant to fix my funk, not make it worse. And granted, it did help a little but I felt myself slipping into apathy and disinterest and, frankly, I freaked out a bit.
I don’t know why I have a huge preoccupation with my own mental health but I always have. Despite now accepting myself for the habitual person I am, as a child I was worse. I would hesitate to say I should have been diagnosed with anything, but if anyone interrupted my routines as a kid I would get…upset, to say the least. Some time around the age of ten or eleven, I realized how not-good it was that I got so upset when I couldn’t carry out my desired habits and forcefully and consciously decided to stop one of my routines. It was terrifying and freeing, and since then I have had some probably also not-good hypochondriac paranoia regarding my own mental health.
Anyway, all this to say that, thanks to my unrelenting tendency towards hypochondria, I was concerned about my growing apathy and disinterest. So, I felt like I needed another Big Change to shake me out of my funk. But what could I do since I had already just moved from Florida? Obviously another Big Move was not on the table. I still followed a bunch of tattoo artists on Instagram so I started actively looking for artists that were located in the Northeast. I wasn’t completely sure of what I wanted to get, something which would normally have been a red flag for me since my philosophy re: tattoos was something like, “if you still want the design after a year, then you can get it”.
I found an artist in Brooklyn whose style I immediately loved. Her main claim to fame is tattoos of roses and other flowers, something which appealed to me since I thought (and still think) it was unlikely I would ever not like flowers. I reached out to her over email for a consultation and started off with some big idea of getting a bunch of different flowers that symbolized important things in my life. Ultimately, I said, “Fuck it”, and stuck with two that I knew would be simple, yet meaningful to me: a rose and apple blossoms.
The artist approved of my choices and we scheduled an appointment a few weeks away. I put down a (not cheap) deposit for my session. And I was immediately terrified. What was I doing? Why did I go through with this? Can I even back out now if I change my mind? I spent maybe 30 minutes halfway regretting and seriously questioning my life choices. And then, amazingly, I realized I was happy. I finally had broken through my apathetic state and was pursuing something I had wanted for over a year and actually doing it even though it was terrifying.
I contacted a friend in Brooklyn to come with me to my appointment. It hurt like a bitch for over three and half hours. But I didn’t cry so I actually felt kind of badass since I have no concept of my own pain tolerance and was sure I would. My friend also thought I was a badass even though in my own head I was saying, “Ow, ow, ow, omg ow”, for the majority of the session. It was the weirdest high I have ever experienced and I was left with an awesome tattoo. It healed amazingly and since then I’ve been successfully surprising people (and myself) with my secret badassness that I still feel is mostly a lie because like, 30% of people have tattoos or something so it’s not that rare? But it was a huge deal for me to get one so it still serves as a reminder that sometimes terrifying and painful things can result in something beautiful as long as you’re willing to commit.