Making peace with the past, and its scars

In the process of writing last week’s post about transformation I started thinking about my phoenix tattoo, which got me thinking about regret and acceptance.

The phoenix is, of course, a potent symbol of transformation. It’s the mythical bird that rises from the ashes after adversity. The caterpillar emerging from its cocoon into a beautiful butterfly. You get the idea. 
I was certainly making a statement when I chose to get a phoenix tattooed on my upper back at the age of 22. I was also ahead of my time, as Ben Affleck has just done the very same (although his is more colourful and impressive).

To give you some background, at the time I got inked, I had come through the other side of a battle with depression and a redundancy. I wanted to carry a mark that would symbolise my resilience and inner strength. I hoped it would give me something to draw on in challenging times. I believed, in the naïve way that only a 22-year-old could, that I was through my biggest personal crisis. I did not then understand that life is a series of challenges and strength building, and that we are reborn again and again and again (unless, of course, we choose to stay stuck).

Instead of being a badge of honour, the tattoo became a source of regret. It didn’t remind me of my transformation, it only reminded me of the misery that had permeated that chapter of my life. I felt disappointed that I had not grown enough to become the person I had believed I could be on day in a dingy Auckland tattoo studio. Plus, it was kinda ugly. 

So, in my early 30s I decided to have it removed. Unfortunately the laser treatment process was excruciating (vastly more painful that the tattooing process), and was predicted to become more so as treatment progressed. It was also costly. So after five treatments I decided to make peace with the now slightly faded bird, and quit treatment. 

My tattoo removal story in Women's Health magazine

I totally understand how people who have tattoos of their ex’s name on their forearms, or Kermit the Frog tattoos on their butt (I actually know someone in this situation), would want to have those removed. But my tattoo wasn’t that awful. So why had I wanted it erased so badly?

What I’d been trying to do was the equivalent of what people do on Instagram every day – edit out the ugly side and present only the elements of myself that I wanted to be seen. I knew that getting rid of the tattoo would not alter the course of my history, but at least it would mean I wouldn’t have to keep reflecting on it – because every time someone saw the tattoo I had had to explain (in the vaguest of terms) that I had been through “a rough period”. In doing so I was invoking the heavy energy around that period once again. I felt a whiff of the despair and, just like a dementor in Harry Potter, its darkness loomed large. I didn’t want to be dragged down by that chapter any longer. I wanted to put that behind me once and for all. 

So very idealistic.

The past is ugly. It has shadows and it leaves scars. It cannot be erased – even with the heat of a laser. The challenge for me has been in finding a middle ground between acceptance and regret. More than a tattoo could, it was in writing about my battle with depression that I finally made peace with the parts of myself from which I had bled so profusely (read that post here). I now neither embrace nor recoil from reminders of my past struggles. I have taken the lessons and am doing my best to gently move on. I have regrets, but I no longer ruminate on them.

We are all better off for what we’ve been through, good and bad. That’s the unsightly truth.

On necessary heartbreak

"You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

I’ve never met a Rumi line I didn’t love, and this sentence is one of my absolute favourites. It reminds me of a quote I read last year by the peerless Cheryl Strayed. Someone had written a letter to her ‘Dear Sugar’ advice column (BTW if you’re not familiar with the Dear Sugar series, you are truly missing out) asking what advice she would give to her twentysomething self.
Her characteristically eloquent response included reference to her decision to divorce her husband in her mid-twenties. She had still loved him, but even though she could not say why, she knew she didn’t belong in the relationship anymore. Cheryl closed with this quote, which I have loved ever since and never forgotten: “Be brave enough to break your own heart.”

When I first read this, it leaped off the page and dug its steely fingers around my own silently shattering heart. You know that feeling, I know you do. Something resonates with you so strongly you’re sure it was written just for you, just for that moment. It is the truest thing of all the true things that have ever been before. At the time I was in the process of completely uprooting my life in New Zealand and moving to Australia for no good reason other than the fact that I could not stay. And no matter how many times people asked me why I was leaving, I could not produce a better answer than “I need a change” – as if this were sufficient to justify the wrench of leaving all the people I loved. If you’re going to leave behind the people who define you, bolster you and imbue your life with so much meaning, you’d want to have a very good reason. I didn’t. Staying meant stagnation, but leaving meant losing so much. I knew ultimately that I would gain in the long run, but in that moment, surrounded by boxes, Customs forms and piles of the objects that had amounted to my life in Auckland, I could only see the losses.

You must be strong enough to break your own heart. Friends, I held these words to my chest and I repeated them at 2am when fear and despair kept me from sleep. I uttered them when I found myself shaking in the toilets at work and in the evenings when I ran out of tissues to collect my tears. These words reminded me that I had to do the thing I did not want to do – even though it made no sense - and proffered the dimmest promise of finding hope on the other side.

We do not grow when we stay stuck, we grow when we take risks and follow our instincts, even when common sense and peer pressure do not support us in those actions. I broke my own heart and I found – as I had suspected it would – that the being strong made me even stronger. It was the right thing and the best thing to do, and it was worth all the tears and all the despair.

My affection for Cheryl’s prose is matched only by my adoration of Rumi, and I firmly believe there is Rumi line for every occasion. On the subject of necessary heartbreak, he offers this: “The wound is the place where the light enters.”

And where light enters, growth happens.

(That last sentence is mine, but you can use it.)

Have you ever broken your own heart? I’d like to give you a high-five. And a hug. Because that is an act of bravado, not to mention self-love. Email me your story here.