write me well

Category: Weekly Blog

  • Timing

    It’s not lost on me that I’m writing this seated at a coffee shop in Hillcrest, fresh from a visit to Balboa Park with a friend of two decades. I’m visiting San Diego for the first time in five years and it’s as fantastic as I remember: just a bit balmy when I stepped off the plane at eight o’clock yesterday morning, already regretting I’d only be here for thirty-six hours, the harbor and rolling green hills and palm-trees-galore totally unchanged. I booked in a double tattoo appointment a few months ago and it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. Post appointment and hangouts with my friend (and missing out on a few because of the timing), I wish I’d made it a real trip and had three more days.

    Alas, that’s life. I’m grateful to even be able to make the trip all things considered. The last time I was on a plane, I was one of thirty-seven people, making the mid-pandemic journey from London to San Francisco because I realized about two weeks after my last post that it was time for another major life shift.

    It’s worked out in that I never left California because I didn’t like California. I, in fact, rather love California (see last post for reference). I spent a month in Sacramento before relocating back to the Bay Area, drawn there unexpectedly by an opportunity with my old District Manager to take over a store in Santa Cruz. Living in such a recent past haunt makes the three years I spent in London feel more than a little like a fever dream – a hyper-realistic, life-changing, fantastic fever dream – and being in San Diego again is like another small dose of the same confusing nostalgia. It’s welcome, though. I’ll take any reminder that here or abroad, the places I love aren’t going anywhere. (For now, at least. This is a no doom-scrolling zone.)

    Talking with my friend this afternoon at the park, the phrase “life is a journey” came up. We were joking, but we also were not. We were talking about how life happens and you do things and once they’ve happened, it is what it is. There’s no right or wrong about it, and all you can do is change what you have now if you’re not happy about it. It was an excellent topic of conversation for someone that’s gone through the intense volume of change I have in the past four months.

    I keep getting Instagram and Facebook memories of a year ago, two years ago, three years ago (the most painful, since they’re from my recent arrival to the UK and filled with obnoxious captions like “can’t believe I get to live here FOREVER”). I made the right decision, moving back to California. But I miss London and my life there – desperately, sometimes. As another close friend of mine is fond of reminding me, two things can be true at once. It was the right decision, but sometimes it’s still hard.

    I got to go to my niece’s preschool graduation and mermaid-themed fifth birthday party. I can go out to lunch with or go spend my day off with my sisters or my mom, wandering thrift shops or discovering the best fried chicken sandwiches. I laid by the pool with my best friend and drank margaritas, and remembered for a moment why it’s so easy to not travel when you live somewhere like California: sometimes just the backyard can feel like a vacation. I’ve got a car and drive through pine-filled mountains every day on my way to work, and live in a neighborhood with a coffee shop I can walk to – not to mention the fact that I get to share the place with my boyfriend, a miracle in itself because I’ve known the guy for fifteen years and life is just really fun (and fantastic) that way sometimes, and things have just, well, worked out.

    When I look back at the last three years, I am nothing but proud. If there is anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can think you know exactly what you want and what’s next, and turns out – you 100% do not. And that’s okay.

  • Roots

    Some of my favorite memories are ones that are impossible to reminisce out loud. I was either alone or surrounded by strangers, which makes me wonder if they ever remember too.  

    Walking to buy popcorn chicken on lunch break from a driver’s education class hosted out the back of a strip mall classroom, hot summer sun and listening to Chutes Too Narrow while reading the book that was about to become my favorite for years. Sitting at countless coffee shops – I have sat at so many coffee shops over the years, because of all of the habits I have formed, it seems to be the longest running. Sometimes with my dog (he’s turning seven this year with a new family, another wild thought), usually alone. Almost always writing, almost never the same thing. Driving up the California coast, having cut through the hills to Laguna Niguel, walking through neighborhoods of the super tanned, super fit, super rich. Watching the ocean on several occasions, because you can never watch the ocean too much.  

    Are you okay? a friend texted me this morning. I’d taken the day before off work, for “reasons”, and she was just checking in. Oh yeah, I reply, Just general what-am-I-doing-with-my-future-life-is-really-weird-right-now malaise. I’m still sitting in that malaise and have been for a week. I spent the last hour looking at apartments in San Diego, even though I’m actively in the middle of sorting out the next phase of my life here in England. But I also spent five hours yesterday watching a show set in sunny southern California, a place that for me will always have a magic glow and impossibly vague siren call. In my dream world, that one with ceaseless funds and a job that allows a semi-rootless existence, I have two homes. One in San Diego, golden and salty and craftsman, with Gilmore, black iced coffees, drives down the 163 and warm walks through North Park and the Gaslamp. A lithe, aesthetic life where I spend my January to June. And across the world, I have my second home, from June to December. A terraced house nestled in a cathedral city, cozy and cold but faultless in the sun, brick and stone and the weight of a storied existence, energy moving from Roman to medieval to Georgian, all within a stone’s throw. A river nearby, because there needs to be water, and books and cups of tea and winding wandering walks, even just to a corner shop for milk.  

    Once when I was living in Long Beach, I decided to make a cake. It was a rare rainy day and I was only missing one or two ingredients. The rain stopped for a few minutes and I tried the tiny grocery a block over, walking rather than driving, getting caught in a downpour moments from the return to my doorstep. I called my mom for company while I baked my cake and tried to explain how much that innocuous walk had reminded me of living in England, of walking to the shops to pick up something, rather than getting into the car. I’ve never owned a car in my years in England, something that will likely change when I eventually leave London, but for now it’s something that draws a very specific divide through my life experiences. Everything about a car feels very Route 66 American, very freeway road trip traffic radio, very windows down Phantom Planet crooning California Here We Come. That will change, but I’m avoiding it. A car is the one form of root I haven’t planted over here. I think something about it makes me nervous in a way I won’t admit.  

    I haven’t had roots in a long time. It’s one of the beauties of being on your own, but it’s becoming exhausting. That’s where the malaise of this week really sits. Hiding beneath the very real exhaustion of living in Unprecedented Times, I’m tired of moving and the excitement of the unknown. I still appreciate how valuable it is to have options. But I would love, very much, to have this be the last “next phase” for a while. Whatever is next needs to last a while. Every move feeds that rootless self, that love of asking myself where do I belong? It makes me want to keep trying new places and finding new homes.  

    But I’ve already found enough homes.

  • The Apocalyptic Thing About Change

    It’s been a good eight months since I last camped out at Foyles. Considering this was an almost weekly haunt of mine before the world imploded back in March, it’d be surreal sitting back down here even if it wasn’t in a room where everyone is distanced in their support bubbles, masked and sanitized and hopefully not infected. Needless to say, the then-and-now difference is hardly just linear.

    How different is my life since I last sat here? Very, but again, not just because of COVID. On a personal level, so much has changed in those eight months. I started a new job, my first outside of true retail (the word retail still hovers, linking me to the past decade of my work, but there are other words in my job title that will hopefully lead to the next decade). Not only that, but I’m a month into a part time masters’ course at Queen Mary University, something that still feels a little wild to me, if I’m honest. Less so now than it did in my second lecture at the end of September, when one really-not-that-silly question suddenly made me feel so deeply out of my depth that I spent the next seventy-two hours scrambling for an eject button. But still wild.

    I like to blame my whimsical Piscean flighty-ness when it comes to my love of the eject button (nothing says commitment issues like an inability to go on a second date nearly seven years after I left my last relationship), but the truth is I think it’s a pretty natural reaction. As much as you think it’s going to be a comfort to discover the thing you want to do with the rest of your life, it’s actually fucking terrifying. My genuine love of castles and Empress Matilda and medieval anything sustained me through the application process, the visions of my rural English future in the heritage industry suddenly validated when I was accepted into QMU’s Heritage Management program in July. But the reality of taking steps down a new professional path shook me more than I was prepared for, and I’ve had to do a fair amount of talking myself down (read: panic texting) since logging into that first virtual seminar.

    On an emotional level, the last eight months saw the last two-thirds of being in therapy. I had two major blows that kicked off that particular journey: first, the sudden death of my dad last July, and second, being forced to step down from my job at Regent Street. The death of a parent is traumatic by nature, and I wrote an essay about why my personal experience of it was such. But in a different way, my demotion shook me even further. For someone whose only adult concept of commitment was to work, suddenly being told you’re not nearly good enough at your job (whether true or not) makes you doubt what you’ve been doing with yourself for the last ten years. So the two experiences, which happened within two months of each other and were equally blindsiding, kind of, y’know, crushed me.

    Being a natural optimist, almost incapable of seeing “cons” and described on more than one occasion as sunshine personified (a favorite compliment I will remember until I shed my mortal coil), I did not handle being crushed particularly well. When my best friend suggested I look into therapy, I listened. Therapy looks different for everyone, and I worked through a goodly amount of my struggles from January to July of this year. I think more than anything the lasting benefits of knowing what it’s like to be heard and give yourself space make therapy for any amount of time worth pursuing.

    So, again still ignoring COVID, we have a career change, the discovery of a new life passion, a return to academia, and the finishing (a loose term) of therapy.

    Mixed in with the life-altering nature of the pandemic, there’s the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, and the personal stock-taking of privilege, being party to, and engaging and benefiting from systems of oppression and learning how to become an ally. Of expanding my awareness beyond the borders of these personal things that have happened to me in the past eight months and processing the experiences of others.

    I remember posting about Ahmaud Arbery back in March, making my first calls to a DA office to leave a voicemail, and being terrified of doing it “wrong”, and almost letting that fear stop me from talking about it. Fast forward to Breonna Taylor. To George Floyd. To it becoming belatedly apparent that staying silent in the past was to be complicit, that to be “apolitical” is (and always has been) synonymous with “my life isn’t effected enough to care, and I don’t care that yours is”. What kinds of changes has this wrought in my life? Adding antiracist reading to my regular book stack. Educating myself on systemic racism, and diversifying my feed, my shopping, and my cultural consumption. Learning that you never stop learning, and that it is a privilege that my education in this subject is academic and not physical.

    And then, we have COVID.

    When I finally got the call that my Italian citizenship had gone through back in 2014, I spent the next few years hemming and hawing about actually making the move back to England. Those were the days before Brexit seemed remotely possible, so instead of being plagued by potential red tape, the primary case I made for staying in the states could be narrowed down to one thing and one thing only: the movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

    Really? you ask, understandably judgemental of the fact that a plot that involved Keira Knightley and Steve Carell as a plausible romantic couple could make me feel anything other than bafflement. Yes, really. For those unfamiliar, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a black comedy that chronicles the last days of earth, after a final attempt to stop a meteor flying towards our home planet fails (…emphasis on the black in black comedy). Keira Knightley and Steve Carell live in the same apartment building, but they don’t meet until he happens upon her, crying on the fire escape, because she has just found out she missed her last chance to fly back to the UK to see her family before the world ends.

    Call me crazy, but that movie and that circumstance really fucked me up. I empathized with Keira Knightley’s character, because choosing to live across an ocean from most of the people you love does relinquish a certain degree of control you have over your life. Sure, it’s unlikely that if I lived in Philadelphia and needed to get home to my family under emergency circumstances, that I’d be able to do so on foot. But if it came down to it, physics wouldn’t stop me. You don’t need a plane (or a pilot, for that matter) to make that journey. If I moved to England, though? That was no longer true, and, ridiculous or no, that fact kept me stateside for years.

    Obviously, my feelings eventually changed. Not my feelings towards that fear – it’s still deeply rooted within me. But my practical side caught up with me, and egged on by the nagging dissatisfaction I had with my life back in California, I made the move to the UK in 2018. I figured the chances of an apocalypse that would somehow stop me from visiting home and seeing my family was too absurdly unlikely to sacrifice my dream.

    Writing this in October of 2020, I think I owe my past self an apology. COVID may not be the apocalypse, but as impossible as the possibility seemed then, we do now live in a world where any minute my ability to go home can suddenly be, well, disabled. More likely than not, it’d only be a temporary problem, but still. Talk about things you never saw coming. (Or did. But wrote off because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.)

    So, now, not ignoring COVID, it’s been a long eight months. A whole lot has happened and I am grateful that if nothing else, Foyles is still standing, and I’ve been able to return after all this time, in this unfamiliar world, to something familiar.

    Change has many guises and I don’t know that I have anything more philosophical to contribute to the discourse than that. But it would be remiss of me to sit in this café and not share the experience so as to commune even the slightest bit with that old life of mine. I’m pretty busy these days, whether with work or study or just existing, but I’m going to do my damnedest to try and be here a little more. Despite everything that has happened and continues to happen, writing brings me joy, and we can all use a little more joy, right?

    And while all that means in the context of this blog is that I’ll post a little more, I’m not sorry. As Carl would say, I will not apologize for art.

  • The Impossible Thing About Self Worth (…and capitalism)

    I sat across from my friend at the Market Hall in Victoria, warmly sequestered inside brick walls, surrounded by nine-to-five suits on their trendy lunch break, drinking the best latte I’ve had in months, wondering how on earth this beautiful person in front of me could possibly feel incapable.

    To me, she had so much to offer. A ceaseless, passionate energy, a way with words that a troubadour would envy – blonde mermaid’s hair and a knack for making any marbled knit sweater drape perfectly from her well-postured shoulders. And I sat there, thinking these things, knowing that she was envious of so much about my life. My career, my stability, my trajectory. She was afraid the way so many of us have been throughout the course of our lives, because she has no idea what’s next or how to get there. As we both sipped our lattes and went about splitting a chocolate muffin between us, I realized I was just as jealous of her.

    It struck me like a crack of cold air in that rosy warm space that the both of us thought we were in exactly opposite positions, when really, we were exactly the same. And I can’t help looking around me and feeling strangely like many of the amazing women I know in my life are in this same position and that it is total and complete bull shit.

    Waxing poetic about the downsides of capitalism isn’t something I’m generally drawn to. In fact, writing about anything that has a semblance of cultural importance is almost always beyond both my interest and remit. But the past few weeks have been such a trial and filled with instances of questioning what is worth – what is value – why do we do what we do? That even I, Piscean and ENFP and optimistic to a blistering, painful fault, feel compelled to address it. Why is it that we so aggressively measure ourselves against anything other than wellness and happiness? Why are so many careers, about things that so resoundingly do not matter, valued so highly?

    I wonder these things, three hours after my latte with my friend, in a different hipster coffee shop, now upgraded to a matcha latte, and realize that there is a very simple reason I don’t often contemplate these kinds of things. It’s fucking terrifying. If I think about it for more than five minutes, it’s like trying to wrap my head around a black hole (or space in general, which to me is not the final frontier: it is a terrifying endless mystery that I have no interest in considering or peering into).

    Only this black hole isn’t something I can wilfully ignore (because really, will I ever have to confront SPACE?). I have to participate in and engage with this black hole every day. I have to try and figure out what it’s actually all about so I can decide what my next career move is. I have to measure myself against its fathomless fiscal depths before I can give myself a speck of confidence that I’m on the right path. And that’s what really scares me.

    Keeping my nose stuck firmly in the past has long been my defensive tactic. A belief as unshakeable as it is absurd, that not knowing what the future holds validates not planning for it, sits nestled at the base of my spine, and it impractically refuses to dislodge. I focus on the lives of people that lived eight hundred years before me, people who even had we shared the same time would have been worlds away from me, and I can’t stop. I visit the places they lived, see the buildings they built, stand in the churches they prayed in, and feel a sense of connection and belonging, a strength of spirit, that I’ve come to live for. I tell myself that those experiences are the ones that matter, that they’re more important than the big picture – because maybe there is no big picture. And as far as defensive tactics go, it worked really well!

    Right up until everything blew up in my face.

    In the back of my mind, I always had a deeply underappreciated belief that not only was I great at my (capitalist) job, but that I would always be great at it and that there was nowhere to go but up. It wasn’t until about two months ago that everything changed and suddenly I was sat on my own, looking in the mirror, wondering what I was really good for, and where I could possibly go.

    A crisis of career confidence is never a pleasant experience. This was my first. I’ve had them before in the sense that I wished I could be a writer, a novelist, a columnist – anything that involved people loving my writing and paying me to produce it – and that I never was granted said wish. But then, I never really tried that hard. I always knew that the only thing to regret in that regard was that I hadn’t truly bothered. As a manager, though, since the moment one of my first DM’s sat me down and told me I was great, I had the luxury of lacking self-doubt of any kind. I knew I was good at my job, I knew I deserved good things, and I loved that about it. It gave me value and worth and I reaped wonderful rewards from it for years. This crisis of confidence was about that job, the one I was actually doing, not some intangible dream job crisis. It profoundly shook me up and prompted a resounding, excruciating, “WHY?”

    When I was living in San Jose before I moved back to England, I had everything going for me. If there was a time to be complacent, that was it. Stellar roommate, great job, ace colleagues, and my family close by. But I knew I was missing something and it was that sensation that brought me back over here. In attempting to answer that big old “WHY”, I’ve realized that maybe I had reached a level of stability that was endangering my life’s path, leaving me complacent when that wasn’t in the cards yet. Because let’s be real – would I be out here, asking these big questions, reconsidering a path I long since thought was sorted out, if the past two months hadn’t happened? No fucking way!

    Wasn’t this supposed to be about other women too, though, you ask? And capitalism in general? You’re right. Selfishly, my own turn in fortune has brought to light a bigger picture conversation about valuing a bottom line over the hard work of the people you employ. Customer service and retail are the absolute bowels of that aspect of capitalism. Where else can you work your ass off and yet everyone you work for – customers and big wig bosses – have a free pass to shit on you over PRODUCT?

    OVER PRODUCT.

    I have long been in this career for two reasons: people and their development. I am actively looking out for the people the brands I work for employ, trying to help them find what drives them, making sure they have a good thing going and that work isn’t just a place they come to pick up a pay check. My teams drive great service because they are supported and validated. It’s certainly not because they’re being paid exceedingly well or feel like they’re changing the world. But every day, we’re doing our job, and doing it well. If people can’t see that – or if they can, but they don’t think it’s enough – then maybe I am in the wrong field. And maybe I did need a kick in the teeth to realize I need to do this somewhere else.

    Which brings me to today’s coffee with my friend. That moment where we spent hours talking about the endless spread of opportunities in this world of simple rules – work for the man, get your money, do your thing on your own time – that starting from scratch is just as inspiring as it is terrifying. And I wondered at the ridiculousness of being able to preach that so confidently to her when I knew that I as soon as she got on her train and I went my separate way, that I would do anything but give myself the same advice. If she has endless choice, why don’t I?

    The answer is, I do. We all do. If we really want to take the advice that (particularly when you’re inordinately privileged by birth) the only thing stopping you is you, we can. But it feels real fucking impossible right now even though nothing is really that bad. So the next step is to get myself to believe it.

    How am I going to do that? Start with small truths, the ones that are easiest to swallow. I’ll begin with the illusive bright side, the mercurial silver lining of essentially getting demoted. Maybe the universe realized I didn’t so much need a job that was stressing me out beyond all belief, but that I needed the friendship of all of my amazing colleagues, something I’d denied myself due to a rigorous belief in drawing professional lines as a manager. Maybe I needed that kick to dislodge that feeling at the base of my spine – that not planning for the future is an okay life policy – and create a long game strategy. Maybe I needed the spare brain space that having less responsibility leaves me with to wrap my head around the exhilaration (and terror) of a fresh start.

    I genuinely have no idea where I’m going to go from here. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way about my life. But slowly, one day at a time, I’m going to indoctrinate that philosophy deep in my bones until I breathe its truth every day. Because the world IS filled with opportunities – I do believe that – and it’s up to me to grab them. And sure, there’s a lot of really shitty shit out there too, but if I can’t be one of the people out there turning it around, helping to give value to those amazing women that feel like they don’t have anything to offer, then what else am I gonna do?

    Time to get out there, to motivate, to encourage, to make them laugh and smile and get inspired. I may not yet drink my Koolaid, but I’ve got a tepid matcha latte, and that’s kind of the same thing, right? It’s time to do something bigger and be part of a solution. Retail isn’t shitty because it’s unworthy and filled with people that never tried hard. It’s shitty because all too often it thrives on the ceaseless and thankless work of countless people all for the glory of capitalism. While I’m in it, I’m going to continue to fight for those people and the struggles they face every day. But big picture, it’s time to figure out how I can do that in a bigger way.

    The unknown I’m about to face while I try and figure that out is not like space because it is terrifying (it is).

    It is like space because it is limitless.

  • Tattoos Are Kind of Awesome

    When I was twelve, as a birthday present, my parents had the less-than-stellar idea to let me paint my bedroom however I wanted. Because I was twelve, I picked a different color for every wall, and because my room was a square with the corner cut off, I got to pick FIVE colors. There was the green wall, where I would later begin thumb-tacking CD’s and posters. There was blue wall, with its wide windows and view of rolling golden hillsides. There was the weird, sort of pre-coral-becoming-a-fashionable-color coral wall, with my door and a Jack Sparrow poster. And the sunshine-yellow wall, against which I shoved my “I don’t need a bedframe for my mattress, guys” bed, directly on the floor. Finally – most importantly – there was the purple wall, where my trusty Vaio PC was stationed, my matching plastic purple desk chair, matching purple keyboard and matching purple desk accessories.  

    This remained my set up for years, and it was seated in that purple chair next to that purple wall that I discovered Outer Limits Tattoo in Long Beach and decided I wanted Kari Barba to do my first tattoo. I was about fifteen at the time. 

    I’m well aware that lots of young teen girls go through a tattoo-wanting phase, and I’m not here to tell you that mine was more interesting or REAL than all those other girls’ (except it is, and was, obviously). What I will say is that for what should have been one of my cooler phases as a teen, I still managed to find a way to make it as nerdy as possible. Did I want a super sweet butterfly or rose? Did I want a cross or a quote? Nah, yo. I wanted my family crest. Which, for the record, isn’t really even a thing, because for those of you that don’t know, my last name is King. Unsurprisingly for the generic non-royalty we are, we don’t have one.  

    (Bad family crest tattoos, I eventually found, are a cliché all their own. Not nearly as cute as butterflies, they typically were more in the realm of bro-y white dudes in their twenties. It’s probably for the best that I outgrew that desire before I turned eighteen and gained the legal ability to do anything about it.) 

    Where my interest in that particular design faded, my love for all things tattoo flourished. I did sidetrack into Piercingville first for a few years in my late teens and early twenties, but come my college graduation, I decided I was ready for my first tattoo.  

    I unironically traded in my dude-bro cliché for an appropriately late 2000‘s white girl: a feather a quill pen. When it was my only tattoo it got a lot more comments than it does these days, my favorite being “Oh, I love your tattoo! Where did you get it, Urban Outfitters?” from a good friend. Despite that friend being completely on point, my quill pen is still one of my favorites. It officially introduced me to what is now one of my favorite hobbies.  

    I love tattoos. I love them for a lot of reasons, some that wouldn’t surprise my fifteen year old self, some that would blow her mind a little. And since I can’t share them with her, I’ll share them with you instead. 

    Not Every Tattoo Has to “MEAN” Something 

    When I was younger I was deeply convinced that all tattoos needed meaning. I swore I would never understand people that got silly tattoos. A joke, PERMANENTLY on your body? What about the aesthetic? At the time a religious fan of Miami Ink, and then LA Ink, I’m not surprised that I subscribed to this particular theory.  

    Even outside of reality television it’s a popular one. Why would you bother permanently marking your body with something not memorial? It’s like the physical, permanent version of doing it for the Vine. I thought there was something wrong with the mindset of “I just wanted it” or “it’s funny”. Or, best case, maybe I just didn’t understand it yet.  

    And I was right: over the years, I discovered with relish that it really is that simple. Sometimes you just want something, and sometimes something is just funny. Because people can do what they want, they get funny tattoos.  

    If anything, silly tattoos are really the kind to celebrate the most. We need more fun and more laughter in life. I don’t yet have any tattoos that I would qualify as a silly tattoo, but the closest I have is Yorick, seated permanently on the top of my wrist. He was essentially a tattoo borne of a whim, and every time I see him, his stupid gummy no-toothed grin makes me happy, as do the words above him (“Alas, poor Yorick!”). THAT’s why not every tattoo has to mean something. Sometimes they just make you happy, and I am all about that.  

    One of my favorite tattooing anecdotes was from a conversation during the second session on my Norwich Cathedral shoulder piece. My artist, Mez, was talking about how she long ago ran out of prime space to get good tattoos, and due to how old she’d been when she stepped onto the tattoo scene – in the earlier days, before it was mainstream – she had her fair share of plain old shitty tattoos. But whenever she meets other people that are equally heavily tattooed, and from the same age group, they’ll see each other, note the older, shittier of their pieces, and give each other the head nod of shared experience. They’ve seen some shit, and yeah, some stuff you laser off. But others you keep around so you can laugh about it. 

    Tattooing is a Viable Creative Trade 

    Creativity is the BEST. It’s the best in every form. With the rise of mainstream tattooing and social media platforms like Instagram, suddenly there are thousands more creative people that get to do what they love for a living. They’re artisans with avid followings that at times even have the opportunity to travel abroad and do what they love. Much the way I love that musicians and the lyrics they write are our bards, the best example of widely-read and lucrative poetry out there, I love that tattoo artists are every day purveyors of art for the public. They’re making the world more beautiful and fun without having to sell out in the sense of designing products for shitty companies or, more likely, just having to have a nine-to-five because like many artists, they can‘t live off of the trade they love. 

    Do not get me wrong – tattoo artists work hard. Especially in places like America, where health care only comes with the luxury of that nine-to-five, they have to work really, really hard to make it work. I follow several and know that almost every one of them has had their own journey, with the one common trait being it was not easy and required a lot of sacrifice. But the great thing about tattooing is that, unlike making it in music, tattooing is even better because it’s a much more accessible field to support yourself in. Not every tattoo artist is going to be Florence Welch, but they’ll be better off than being stuck playing dive bars forever. If you’ve got the will to work for it, you can make it happen.

    Tattooing is a far from perfect field – another thing I’ve learned from all of the artists I follow, the majority of whom are female. It’s definitely not equally accessible to everyone, with women and POC facing more challenges than most. But like any good and growing field, lots of artists are trying to change that, and slow but steady, it’s happening out there. The fact that the conversation is even happening is a step in the right direction.  

    They’re Always There! (And Nobody Can Take Them Away) 

    Second to writing, fashion is my favorite form of self-expression. How I dress and how I aesthetically present myself has been major for me since my first day of fifth grade when I wrote an essay about the outfit I’d chosen (it was a sleeveless pink-and-white hibiscus patterned dress, with matching fuchsia shoes. I wore my hair in two braids and looked AMAZING).  

    Tattoos are, in short, the ultimate form of that. While you do run the risk of dating yourself, accidentally subscribing to trends that don’t last past 2011, I have the same theory about tattoos that I do about fashion and design: if you always exclusively choose things that you absolutely love, you can’t lose. In the end, whether you’re talking your outfit, your overall closet, your living room, or your body, it will all work out.  

    If I put no other effort into how I look on any given day, my tattoos still speak for me and tell you something about the kind of person I am. Sure, that’s more information than some people may ever have the inclination to share with any stranger they walk by. But it’s my choice to share it and that I can through tattoos is one of my favorite aspects. Besides, I sit firmly in the millennial camp, where we spend our money and put our faith in experiences over things. Tattoos are a handy way to have a little, permanent bit of both. 

    There’s a definite level of privilege when it comes to having the luxury of making that choice, in terms of how I present myself, in the first place. I’m very grateful for the ability to choose to get the tattoos I have, to be able to share them with people, and to have both of those qualities (hopefully) for the rest of my life. 

    Fifteen year old me would probably have a lot to say to the version of her that’s twice her age and writing this. She’d be really curious as to where all her hair’s gone (pixies and buzz cuts for life), why most of the remaining hair is grey (what’s up Italian Policastri genes), and why she’s wearing gold jewelry instead of silver jewelry because all gold jewelry is TACKY, KATHY. But her tattoos? I think that once she got past the fact that there’s no family crest to be seen, she’d be pretty impressed. I’ve got the thirty-year-old Kathy version in the form of the Empress Matilda and Peggy Olson.

    I never did get a piece by Kari Barba. There’s definitely still plenty of time, but these days, I’m not quite so close to Long Beach, and my list of artists whose work I admire and want has grown extensively. What I loved first about Kari Barba when I saw her remains the same. She looked badass, she had a badass job, and she was a woman in a culture I was desperate to join. Fifteen years later, I’m well on my way. Because tattoos are AWESOME.