Who am I? Part Three
Some more of the multitudes I contain
Welcome to Part Three of my “Who am I?” series. If you haven’t already read the intro or the first set of stories, go do that first! I’ve been having fun walking chronologically through my memories of how I’ve become the person I am today. Exa had much influence in my first set of tattoos, as discussed in the previous post. While the first two tattoos here are literally connected to our relationship, the second half of today’s post starts to mark a notable transition towards my own individuation. I’m excited to share this next selection of tales.
When people see this tattoo, a guessing game immediately starts!
Magnesium?! Manganese? Wait, that’s not right — 16 is sulfur. Is it an M scrabble tile? But that’s not worth 16 points.
I’ve had this conversation many times, and it’s always fun for me. Sometimes I give hints, and other times I just let the person run out of steam and trail off. It’s not very common for someone to correctly guess that it’s actually a crossword square! I’ve been a word-nerd for most of my life, loving word puzzles of all sorts. In 2020 when the world shut down, Exa and I developed a serious crossword puzzle habit. We started by completing a physical 50x50 puzzle, and then proceeded to start doing the daily New York Times puzzles. Crosswords have been a central part of our relationship for many years now.1
On the night before our wedding, I was working on the Saturday puzzle at my parents house, and suddenly I realized that the central entry of the crossword (that the constructor probably built the grid around) was 16 Down: MARRIEDLIFE. I immediately called Exa (we were at our respective parents’ houses on the eve of our wedding) to discuss the crazy universal coincidence. I love looking at my life as a series of serendipitous coincidences that can’t be explained. Whether it’s the train station meet-cute, the wedding crossword, or the dream-job opportunity perfectly falling into my lap, sometimes I gleefully look to the universe in awe and gratitude.
One of my favorite concepts is pronoia, or the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing that the world is conspiring against me, I love to believe that instead everything is out there for my own benefit, and I can turn a curious eye to every opportunity to find those positives. Of course, there is an inherent selection bias here. We could have gotten married on 10,000 other days and never had this moment. But as someone who sometimes rationalizes away coincidences, it feels sweet to relish in them and believe in something larger than myself.
Continuing with the wedding theme, when we went on our large Southeast Asian honeymoon2, we knew that we were going to commemorate the trip with a set of matching tattoos. Exa once again designed these3 tattoos and an artist in Thailand inked us one after another (currently these are our only matching tattoos).
The specific designs are abstract representations of a cross-section of a tree, specifically the giant redwoods found around the coast of California, where we spent some time shortly after our wedding the year before. These tattoos stand for the growth and history of a tree, being able to see each ring and the stories they tell over time, maturing into new versions of itself. Exa and I are together on our individual journeys of growth.
“Growth” is a buzzword, especially in the realm of self-help. Often times people think about personal growth on a solo path that one takes to improve themselves and achieve more. In this particular growth metaphor though, I like to think about Exa and I growing together as trees next to each other, much like our tattoos signify. As we grow further into ourselves, from the outside it may seem like the two trees are not connected at all. But actually, under the ground there is a vast root network of connection and support that only gets stronger over time.
Every year since we’ve gotten married, Exa and I have had a tradition4 where, amongst other things, we pick a theme for our last year together. That first year we chose the theme of growth. We ended up celebrating by going to a moss wall art class, on brand with the tree tattoo. The year prior we had really started to lean into the ways that we weren’t letting ourselves be free, orienting towards more growth and change. It has certainly been scary and hard, but I feel so grateful to be doing it alongside someone I love so much.
Often times in my experience, growth requires individuation. In the 8 years Exa and I had been dating, we hadn't spent more than 10 days apart — until my trip to South America. And then I decided on a whim5 to go on a 3 week trip to Patagonia with my friend Max. This period of time was one of the first times I had ever paused from goal-directed achievement. I had always been chasing some next step, whether it was success to get into a good college, or do well in a class, or find a good job. But during this period of funemployment, there was no goal. So instead, I just had a ton of time on my hands. I remember musing a lot on time during this period of my life, wondering how I was going to spend it. Many friends encouraged me to just enjoy my youth while I could, while my parents projected their worries about me finding a job or success. It was confusing, because there didn’t seem to be a right answer, and people were telling me different things.
When I went to Buenos Aires after the Patagonia trip, I was immersed in a beautiful purple6 city and I had a chance to just explore on my own while Max was working. I knew that I wanted to get a tattoo at a specific studio that Exa had recommended, but I didn’t know what I wanted until a few days before. This was new to me - normally I had been so intense about my tattoo planning, but I found aspects of my rigidity softening throughout this trip.
For this studio, I had to send in a full application in Spanish with a lot of information, including some seemingly unrelated info like my favorite musical artists. It felt like a final exam of my time in South America, as the artist didn’t speak any English at all. I had shared some inspiration and an idea for the tattoo in the application, but this studio’s rule was that they wouldn’t show you the final design until you get there. The morning of my tattoo appointment, I found someone at a cafe who had an almost identical tattoo to what I was planning to get. I felt the pronoia7 that morning - to this day, I haven’t seen anyone else with the same tattoo.
The tattoo itself is a slightly abstract take on a logogram from one of my favorite movies, Arrival8. I thought it was apt to get a tattoo about language and translation while I was exploring my relationship to Spanish for these few weeks. The logogram itself simply means “time”, which felt perfect. During this period, I was in that question of how to spend my time and what was right. I was still trying to optimize because that was in my nature, but it was hard to orient to what I was trying to optimize. Was it fun? Enrichment? Connection? This question was unanswered for another 8 months after this tattoo, when I really started to learn what it felt like to let go.
When I got back from Sleepawake9 in Summer of 2024, I knew I was going to get a tattoo that represented some of the gifts I had gotten from the experience. In fact, I had actually made a promise10 to a friend in my cohort that I would be getting one, so I knew I had to deliver! It didn’t take too much thinking before I came up with what I wanted to do. There were many lessons, habits, and mannerisms I had picked up from this retreat, but one of the most obvious (and probably among the more annoying to my friends) was that I would put my hands on my heart and stomach and breathe slowly.
To me, this was a reminder to check in with my heart and my gut, and not just inhabit my head. Before Sleepawake, I had always been seen as a “heady” person without much connection to embodiment. But a big shift that came of me starting to do this kind of emotional work was feeling my feelings and sensations in my body. This suddenly gave me access to emotions I didn’t know I could feel, like deep anger, fear, and bliss. It felt right to come out of this experience with a physical reminder of the changes that I was undergoing.
When I told the artist about my idea, he loved it and ended up filming an interview to post on his Instagram11 for marketing. The tattoo itself ended up being a fun process to create with the artist. We ideated several things together, but the one we landed on was literally tracing my hands on my chest and stomach. It has become one of my favorite tattoos visually because whenever I wear a low-necked top or crop top, parts of it peek out!
It feels perfect to be ending this post with this tattoo, as this series marks a shift from connection to and reliance on Exa, to a more solid connection to self. The work of individuating was really amplified in the 30 days of retreat that I spent without Exa, with many beautiful gifts that are still presenting themselves to me two years later.
Several of them will be shared in the next (and final for now12) post of this series!
Over many months, we went from needing help doing the easiest Monday puzzle, to finishing hard Saturday puzzles, to a streak that lasted 80+ days, to eventually having a “crossword divorce” where we got separate accounts because we were too good to do them all together.
This is the longest vacation I’ve ever been on, going to Japan, South Korea, and Thailand on many adventures.
Ok if your wife is a visual artist, you better believe you would want her designing a lot of the images you’re putting on your body permanently!
We’ve got lots of traditions, but this one I’m particularly proud of because it’s been super fun and sweet so far!
Whims are not super common for me, so thank you Max for presenting this cheap airfare to me a few weeks before my pending layoff, at the perfect time for me to make a spontaneous travel decision. I never would have decided to go to Patagonia otherwise, and so I’m incredibly grateful.
I didn’t know what it was going to look like until I got there, but we happened to visit in the 2 weeks where the city was full of purple jacarandas in bloom, and I could truly say the entire city was purple, my favorite color.
I know, I know - I’ve seen so many people with so many tattoos so maybe it’s bound to happen at some point… LET ME HAVE THIS!
Which is an incredible movie based on one of my favorite novellas called Story of Your Life. The film is brilliant — it puts similar adaptations to shame (looking at you, Project Hail Mary, one of my favorite books, whose recent blockbuster I found disappointing).
Huh, I hope I can one day reach folks with this blog who haven’t heard of Sleepawake yet! I will certainly make a post about my experience at one point, but for now I’d recommend you check out the website linked if you’re curious!
On “Wants Day”, we asked people in our cohort for big scary things that we thought were likely to be “no”s. My friend tentatively asked me to get a Sleepawake themed tattoo with him and I barely hesitated before saying yes!
He’s a pretty famous artist in NYC, and so I had two friends I hadn’t spoken to reach out to me after seeing me on their feed. This may be the most viral I’ve ever gone (so far…).
I’ll have to decide if I want to add to an existing post when I get more tattoos, or batch them.
Interesting!!!