This Is The Sea
6 minute read
It’s years since I’ve written out New Year’s Resolutions. Maybe it was the lockdown that made me do it this year - the idea of something tangible, stepping stones of certainty in the river of unknown - or maybe it was because, at this point in my life, I’ve learned that if I don’t write something down, it just won’t get done. Oh, and then there was the fact that it was already February when I wrote my list, by which time I’d usually have given up on them anyway, so that took the pressure off a bit.
I am looking at the list now, 10 items hastily scribbled under the heading 2021 Goals that cover everything from writing deadlines, starting to drive in New York City (fodder for a later column, I am sure) the usual suspects around eating and saving money and then, in the middle of all that, item number six: Get a tattoo.
I don’t know if it’s true to say that I’ve always wanted a tattoo but I know I have for quite a while. In my second novel, my protagonist and her partner decide to take the plunge and get matching tattoos, a plot point that involved my first (and, up until now, only) trip to a tattoo parlour in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. As the very patient tattoo artist showed me endless folders of options, for one brief moment I toyed with jumping up in the chair and getting one myself. But as so often happens with me, rationality and fear had a stern talk with spontaneity and so I ended up living vicariously through my protagonist instead. Which, given the book was called What Might Have Been Me, did seem somehow fitting.
That was 12 years ago and at 35 deciding not to get a tattoo seemed final, like if I didn’t get one then, then I never would. And as the years ticked by the prospect seemed more unlikely, I mean, what kind of person gets a tattoo in their 40s? And their first tattoo at that? If ever I found myself wistfully admiring a tattoo on someone else, I would ask myself these questions and start listing the ideas in my head why getting a tattoo was a bad idea. The pain and my fear of needles jostled for the top spot on the list and were usually enough to kibosh the whole idea, but if I ever pushed past them there was the issue that I didn’t actually know what I wanted my tattoo to look like and being clear on that - if my character’s experience was anything to go by - seemed pretty important. And so, getting a tattoo was filed in a dusty box in the back of my mind under the heading: Things I wish I’d done. Until, last year, that is.
Most people will remember 2020 for the pandemic but I will remember it for another reason as well. 2020 was the year I did something I thought I would never have the courage to do: 2020 was the year I wrote and published a piece about the sexual abuse I experienced as a child.
The decision to write the piece was not one I reached overnight, in fact, if you’d told me a decade before that I would have been so public about this I would have said you were crazy, that the only writing I would ever do on this subject would be the scrawling, journaling kind that even I wouldn’t be able to make out later. But it turns out that time - and therapy - are both great healers and when I was invited to contribute to Grabbed - an anthology of poetry and personal essays written by other sexual abuse survivors - my piece, quite literally wrote itself.
You know that experience of finally doing that thing you’ve always thought you’d never be able to do because you were too afraid? Well then, you know how amazing it feels afterwards, when you’ve finally done it, when you’re on the other side. Maybe people who parachute or bungee jump get this feeling all the time - maybe that’s why those activities are so addictive - but for me, this is a feeling I’ve had more often when I’ve jumped off some emotional precipice. If I close my eyes I can still feel the elation of walking in my first Gay Pride parade down Fifth Avenue, holding my girlfriend’s (now my wife’s) hand - all the sweeter perhaps given I wasn’t “fully out” at home in Ireland. And I remember feeling that again last summer - some version of it - as I finalised my piece for publication in Grabbed and picked up the phone to have decades overdue conversations to disclose my abuse experience to loved ones I’d never had the courage to tell.
After one of those conversations - by far the hardest - I was on a Zoom session with a therapist in Ireland, someone who had walked alongside me for some of the darkest parts of this journey many years before. It was a Thursday in August and I was in the bedroom of the beachfront apartment my wife and I had rented for two months to escape mid-pandemic New York City. The sun was reflecting on the computer screen, slightly obscuring my therapist’s face when she asked if there was something I wanted to do to mark this milestone. And I heard myself say: “I want to get a tattoo.”
As well as the freedom that comes after doing that thing you’re most afraid of, the other benefit I’ve found is that - for a while anyway - fear of doing other scary things diminishes radically as well.
I discovered this a child, when, after the terror of a dentist’s visit I found myself inexplicably happy on the way home, smiling through my numbed up cheeks. I had done it, the thing I was most afraid of - I could do anything! I was braver than I thought I was.
And so, somehow, in the aftermath of having been so public about my sexual abuse, the prospective pain and even the needles weren’t enough to put me off getting a tattoo anymore. It turned out that once I removed those barriers, the clarity about what image to get rose to the surface without any struggle at all. Those months by the beach - the morning walks where I struggled to build up my courage to face what I needed to face, the changing light on the water that soothed me when I needed soothing - showed me something I’d always known: that no matter where I went in life, I never wanted to be far from the sea. And maybe my tattoo could mean that I would never have to be.
I’m writing this piece looking out at the Hudson River, a block from my apartment - not quite the sea but an expanse of water wide enough and choppy enough that at times it feels like it. My sleeve has fallen down and I find myself hiking it up - I’ve been doing that a lot lately - so I can see the line of wave I have on my forearm. Above it, there’s the moon - a waxing crescent - that reminds me of those nights last summer, drinking tea with my wife, watching the moonlight on the waves.
And I don’t know if it’s because my tattoo is only two months old, or if I’ll always feel this way, but looking at it makes me smile. It makes me smile and it makes me remember what I have learned and keep learning about life - that I am almost always braver than I think I am and that it is never, ever, too late to do anything.
Yvonne Cassidy, September 2021
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