what hurts
That was last week. This week I got a tattoo. It didn't take all that long-- nothing like the hours I spent in a tiny Brooklyn shop with Nozlee (whose Tumblr post you really should read) a couple of years ago, the pain buzzy and tolerable until it wasn't anymore, until the artist had been filling in blacks and shadows for so long that towards the end I thought I might have to ask her to stop for a while, to give me a break. The skin of my forearm was raw and swollen for days and days after.
But I still had enough time to think about pain, lying on my back and staring up at flourescent lights for the second time in as many weeks. About yoga, which introduced me to the idea of sitting still with my discomfort and sorting out the difference between productive discomfort and damaging pain. About boxing, which has no interest in fine distinctions, which is instead about managing instinct: training the body not to panic. To take blows and know okay, I'm fine; to accept a fist to the gut and swing anyway, the counter always coming.
I thought about being twenty-two and needing proof that I was allowed to fuck up inked on my wrists, and then being thirty and needing something big and difficult and almost ugly to mark a decade of survival, the big difficult ugly things I needed to stop pretending had never happened. Those tattoos are so fucking vulnerable. They're things I did when I was still wearing myself down a lot: they're ways of asking if I could still love myself when I wasn't very good or very tough or very much of anything, except tired and scared.
Almost immediately after I got the second one I knew what I wanted for my third. I had had enough of vulnerability, or at least of drawing it on my arms for everyone to see. I wanted something protective, a symbol of my body as safe. It took two years to find the right artist, and to believe that this was really the right thing to do, and then of course it worked out the way these things do: a handful of days after Jews were slaughtered at prayer, I had my version of a hamsa put permanently on my arm.
A few years ago I went to a conference for Jewish professionals where an old friend, Joanna, led a session on hiddur mitzvah: the commandment not just to do mitzvot, but to beautify them. Joanna, a queer woman, talked about the commandment in terms of femme identity, and the idea that beautification is not merely aesthetic, it's actually ritually important. It's not unrelated to my first tattoo, actually, which is about the idea that the spirit in which you pray matters more than the words you're reciting. This idea that taking pride and joy in action, in detail, in experience, matters. That performing ritual that's meaningful and beautiful to me is meaningful and beautiful to God.
I am lucky that I get to think about pain, and play with it on my own terms. I am lucky to get to choose pain that blossoms into beauty: the swing of my fist arcing exactly where I want it, and the black of the ink that lives on my skin. I am my own hiddur mitzvah, a Jewish body celebrated for its Jewishness and its bodyness both. I am grateful for some of the pain of these last few weeks, but not all of it. And I am grateful that I keep teaching myself how to tell the difference.
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Unrelated to any of the above: I recently wrote something fun for Modern Farmer about ancient grains & modern pastries and why pastry chefs care as much about their flour sourcing as the savory types do about the provinces of their coffee and chocolate and olive oil and salt.
I'll also be reading at The Door this Friday, November 2 with my dad and a bunch of very cool pals about being fathers & daughters & subjects under the patriarchy. No tickets, no RSVP, just show up and get a drink and listen!
And for the love of god, please vote.