Tattoo all healed x I wish I’d had the guts to be the person I wanted to be, but other children had taught me, viciously and mercilessly, that they found me contemptable, so clearly the person inside, the true me, was “wrong” somehow. A poorly manufactured human being who evaded the attention of quality control somehow. I always felt afraid to draw attention to myself, so as an adult I was quiet and withdrawn, which was often mistaken for rudeness. I’m not writing all of this to smugly to declare that now I’ve got it all figured out. I most certainly haven’t. I’m still a socially anxious mess. There’s a reason my first tattoo was done in 2008 and this one nearly 20 years later, because I still fret over the opinions of others, and even my own. What if I end up hating it or something goes terribly wrong and I’m stuck with the fucked up result? I’m no guru on the mountain nor am I trying to be. I’m just “a fucked up girl looking for her own piece of mind,” as Kate Winslet put it in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.