What's in a Tattoo?

The urge to remember & the tendency to forget.

Aug 05, 2022

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The other day after brushing my teeth, I startled myself when I caught a glimpse of a tattoo I’d forgotten about above my left elbow. Memory soon arrived to fill in the blanks, but I’ve been thinking about that moment of surprise ever since.

The tattoo is a simple one: a rough circle drawn with a thick line of India ink, which started out black, but has faded to dark blue over the past eleven years. It’s the outline of a rubber bullet scar I acquired at the Toronto G20 in 2010, made permanent by a cute crust punk in a Montréal kitchen six months later. When I asked my friend to tattoo me, I told him it was so I’d never forget what I went through. I wanted to give shape to the dark pit that my life had become, and together we did just that, with masking tape, a sewing needle, a pencil, and ink.

Today’s story is not about the G20; if you’re curious, you can read my account here. Today, I want to explore how I got from then to now, surprised to discover an unfamiliar circle on my arm.

Let’s head back to that Montréal kitchen for a minute. It was in a third-story walkup in the Mile End, above a sporting goods shop and and ice cream parlour. There were six bedrooms, a clawfoot bathtub, and an ancient, powder blue gas stove. There was a creepy storage room in the back where I used chalk to graffiti “I <3 klezmer” on the wall. Over time, this morphed into a hysterical conspiracy theory that a ghost named Klemmie haunted the halls of our creaky apartment. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was our soundtrack, and we once used a ouija board to solve a theft (or accuse an innocent theatre student… I’m no longer sure which.)

I had moved in after returning from the G20, all of twenty years old. There were so many vibrant and hilarious moments in that house: an open mic, a silly hat party, a misfit christmas with toilet paper roll tree, potlucks, playing dressup, bike rides, picnics, and plenty of questionable dumpster dived (dove?) meals.

But I was struggling. My encounter with police violence had left me with post-traumatic stress (which thankfully never became a permanent disorder.) I jumped out of my skin at loud noises, felt overwhelming anger or sadness at unpredictable moments, and when I tried to imagine my future, all I saw was a black hole. For months I spoke compulsively about what had happened to me. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being watched or followed, and it didn’t help that at the G20, undercover police had infiltrated our groups and plainclothes officers spilled out of mini-vans to grab people while they walked down the street.

As the ink hit my skin, I thought about the hole that had been torn in the world I thought I knew. Nearly everyone I had come with had been beaten, arrested or both, even though we had only participated in peaceful protests. My eyes had been opened to the violence of the world and I couldn’t unsee it. Protected by my middle class upbringing, I had been blissfully unaware of how many people were left out of the peace and equality I’d been told Canada stood for. The G20 radicalized me. I embraced a view of the world as a sinister, violent place, where power-hungry elites would go to any lengths necessary to maintain their power, and I chose my side: I would be an ally to the underdog, the downtrodden, the oppressed. There was no going back.

In between then and now, a whole lot of life happened. I moved back to BC, hopping between the mainland, the island, and the Sunshine Coast. I worked one low wage job after another, until I got so sick I couldn’t work for many years. I avoided dealing with my mental health until I was involuntarily forced to. I grappled with my past and wondered how my future had slipped between my fingers.

I also woke up early to garden, and watched my roommate’s kitten grow, and sang in a choir, and swam in the ocean, and made food for my loved ones, and witnessed the beauty of the harvest moon. I jumped on a trampoline, and laughed until my face hurt, and helped build a kissing booth, and made a friend out of a stranger on the train. I took my landlord’s dog for walks, and wore some remarkable outfits, and stayed up late, perched on a roof, eating peach slices with my lover.

For a long time, all of this life, all of this goodness, felt like it was done in spite of a world that was trying to destroy me. My loved ones were an oasis in a hostile universe; the flip side of the care I showed for them was the suspicion I showed for everyone else. I’d heard it said countless times that if you weren’t outraged, you weren’t paying attention. You’d have to be ignorant or privileged to not be severely depressed. I snuck moments of joy and beauty when I could, but I couldn’t live there—real life was hardship, sacrifice, struggle.

After a mental health episode that shook the foundations of my judgement and my trust in myself, I decided to give “being a normal person” a try. I started jogging and took a biology class. I stopped getting odd haircuts and went back to school. I got my driver’s license; I wrote fiction in coffee shops with a cup of tea. I took care of my houseplants; I took pre-calculus and physics. I watched television with my mum and ate popcorn. I went to bed on time.

Some of this didn’t stick, and some of it did (the gay mullet couldn’t be repressed forever.) But I realized that I wasn’t a failure for not having saved the world by my 25th birthday. I wasn’t some super special person, part of a revolutionary vanguard, or an alien trapped in a flesh suit against my will. I was a human being, having human experiences, trying to make sense out of the chaos life had thrown at me. I had a bumpy past and more than a few regrets—but who didn’t? My grip on my outsider identity began to loosen.

As this happened, I started to consider whether, perhaps, the world wasn’t as black and white as I’d thought. Maybe it wasn’t treacherous to enjoy myself. As I started socializing with people outside of my echo chamber, I realized that happy, stable people didn’t achieve this through ignorance. Many of them kept up with the news and shared many of the concerns I had. But their lives were multi-faceted. They got together with their families and friends, and spent time on hobbies they enjoyed, and had learned how to carry out the mundane tasks of life without resentment. Life, to them, was all of it: the hardship and the delight, the love and the grief. I watched them move through the world with an ease and I came to yearn for.

Little by little, I stopped ruminating on my whether my thoughts, speech and action were Good and Pure, and stopped worrying about whether I was making optimal use of every minute of every day. I cut myself some slack, and did the same for those around me. I found that biking, gardening and taking care of rabbits were all much more enjoyable than endlessly searching for what was Bad in me. My life was no longer so frantic. I had time to breathe, to read a salacious novel, to do a whole lot of nothing with my friends.

My future is no longer a black hole—I have so much to look forward to. That moment of surprise in the mirror held an incredible gift: a deep dark pit has become a simple circle.

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