As a born and bred Bay Arean, tattoos are something that I’ve culturally grown up with my entire life. It wasn’t surprising that as a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get my first one. I thought for years of what I would want, what could stand the test of time in terms of meaning and appearance, and where to get it on my body so that it wouldn’t impact my future career aspirations. At the age of 22, I got my first one. By the time I turned 33, I had nearly a dozen.
Each one of my tattoos was deeply meaningful and symbolic and felt important to capture on my skin. I designed almost all of them myself; spent many months working on the designs, allowing them to morph as needed, and found the process of getting inked to be incredibly meditative and spiritually profound. I also had the joy of doing a cover up tattoo for one in particular that no longer suited me as it was anymore.
But then this wild and unexpected thing happened.
For two years I backpacked across numerous countries. I expanded in all the ways that I had deeply craved. I met strangers that became friends in foreign lands. I tried every new form of healing that I came across, from shamanic breath work to ayahuasca. I had past life regressions and soul retrieval healings. I learned new languages, climbed volcanoes, and screamed in rainforests. I left for this epic journey because my world had felt claustrophobically small and returned back home once my spirit had been able to stretch to her fullest capacity.
A new balance had to be achieved after such expansiveness and I needed solitude in order to integrate. The world obliged in this retractedness as the pandemic dawned and everything went inward. I absorbed myself in understanding the woman that I had transformed into over the last handful of years. I reckoned with my past; the brutality that I had endured and the brutality that I had wielded as well. I surrendered to my truth in a way that was simultaneously terrifying and utterly liberating.
I realized that the emblematic art I had painted on my body didn’t belong there anymore. I didn’t want to cover them up or turn them into something else. I wanted the experience of erasing something that is permanent and understanding what must be sacrificed and endured in order to achieve that. And so began my journey with laser tattoo removal.
It took me 30 minutes of physical discomfort and emotional elation to get one tattoo and three years of laser treatments, suffering through the most intense physical pain I’ve ever had to bear and the purging of the memories attached to each tattoo.
Quite the analogy for life isn’t it. We make choices all day long, every single moment is the opportunity for a choice in any given direction. What do you want to eat right now? Do you want to answer that phone call? Do you want to stay in this relationship? Do you want to quit your job? One choice builds upon the next and before you know it, your life can be on a completely different trajectory, one perhaps that you wished for or perhaps the one that you feared the most.
I’ve now felt on a visceral level what it means to make a choice that is easy in the moment and how long and painful it is to rectify said choice. Going through this process of erasing the permanent has made me mindful of the emotional choices that we make and how many days and nights, weeks and years, it takes to heal from those choices. As my tattoos fade and disappear, my mindfulness grows exponentially and I now bow at the altar of my decision-making and humbly respect and honor the process of making one aligned choice at a time.
