When I was looking for someone to tattoo it onto me, my friend contacted a tattoo artist she was acquainted with and asked them if they were available. Their reply was that they would never tattoo anyone’s knuckles because they didn’t want to be responsible for denying someone a job. Admirable, I suppose. But my very nature, my way-of-being, is more likely to deny me a job than the presence of ink permanently fixed beneath my skin.

Bankers and lawyers and engineers and pastors don’t have knuckle tattoos — such tattoos are reserved for tattoo artists and piercing artists; those on the fringes of society. And as such they maybe occupy a unique space in society — something simultaneously seen as a mark which denotes a person as an outcast of sorts as well as a symbol of pride by those who get them. A person with knuckle tattoos is perhaps firmly committed to not having a “respectable” job. Not because they can’t have one but because they don’t want one.

I can’t have a regular job. And I don’t really want a regular job. My knuckle tattoos are a sort of two-fer: “can’t have, don’t want.” But it wasn’t always that way.

Recovering from ECT was perhaps the most hopeless time in my life. During that 6-month nightmare, it was all I could do to just keep going. Three days a week, I was awoken at 4 o’clock in the morning and one of my parents would drive me the 45 minutes to Louisville. There I would get electroconvulsive therapy — the last-ditch effort to save my life. About all I remember from that time is exactly what it’s like to get ECT – it so thoroughly scrambled most of my memories beyond recognition that even 8 years later many things remain a mystery. To have a nightmare, one must be aware of the nightmare. And I don’t think I was aware. My own role in my life was to get the ECT and then recover, and my entire life fell down around me.

Later, after I should have been celebrating my release from ECT, the nightmare set in. There was nothing to do – I had no job, I wasn’t going to school, I had no reason to get up in the morning. Before, at least I had some semblance of a purpose, before I was so exhausted from being put under anesthesia three times a week that I had very little time to reflect on what was happening to me. But after? I didn’t even have to get up to get ECT. There was no role for me in society. I was isolated in the ’burbs with no car and no ability to drive a car. I had time to reflect, I had time to mourn, I had time to discover the extent of my incapacity.

And my incapacity was deep and foreboding. I remember my parents took me to a bookstore one weekend to get me out of the house. The home I’d grown up in, a place which had always offered sanctuary had become a prison — isolated from my friends and the places I liked to go by the fact that I couldn’t get anywhere by myself, I was desperate for escape. But going anywhere by myself was tricky, I was in such a fragile state of mind that I really needed to be escorted.

The bookstore was, in theory, a brilliant idea – I had nothing to do. I have always been a passionate person with a wide variety of pursuits and interests; but, after ECT, my knowledge and skill at those passions had been eliminated and it was overwhelming to the point of stasis to think of regaining them. The hope was to give me something to do — to help me regain a lost passion, reading was perhaps seen as an “easy” one to regain compared to drawing and painting, or cooking, or working with computers. Unlike many authors I’ve read about, I have not been a life-long fan of reading. Reading has been a struggle for me for most of my life and it wasn’t until after I’d graduated high school that I came to appreciate the printed word. We got there, and they told me I could get whatever books I wanted. I selected some books and my Dad paid and we left and went back to their house in the suburbs.

Afterwards, I remember picking up one of the books and laying down on my bed to start reading it. It was Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. I didn’t make it very far into the book before discovering I didn’t know how to read. It’s odd to describe how the inability manifested itself — text messages, the notes my Mom left for me on the kitchen counter every morning made perfect sense to me. I’d never suspected any sort of illiteracy because I was actually literate. But as I lay in my bed, trying to read Year of the Flood, I realized that I had no idea what was happening. The individual words made sense, I could define any one of them. The sentences weren’t gibberish or nonsense to me. But before getting to the bottom of the page, I realized had zero idea as to what any of it meant. In retrospect, I think it was a function of my severely limited short-term memory — my brain simply couldn’t “store” that much information to be able to make sense of it.

And with the realization that I couldn’t read came a hopeless sort of despondency. I hadn’t just lost my fiancée, by beautiful cat, Baxter, my job, my home, etc. I hadn’t just lost my past. I’d also lost any hope of a future. I tried to go back to school, and after a brief glimmer of hope when I aced a prerequisite math class, it became clear that I was right — there was no future for me. I gathered my pride and started the process of applying for SSDI (Social Security Disability Income), it being my only hope of getting out of the prison which was once my childhood home.

Life was hopeless at one point — even after getting SSDI and moving out of my parents’ house, I was faced with just as bleak an existence. There was nothing to do – I had no purpose, no reason to get up. I wanted to live, I wanted to see old age — but I needed more than just a glimmer of a reason to keep doing that. I needed something with substance.

And I eventually found that purpose. In writing. More specifically in writing about mental illness. The thing which tore my life apart combined with something I’ve historically had problems understanding the results of have given me a reason to get up in the morning. Whereas once I used to sleep in as long as possible so as to avoid facing a long, bleak, pointless day – I now get up knowing that my life has meaning.

And what better way to commemorate that than with some knuckle tattoos?

I’ve always valued the words themselves enough to get them tattooed onto my skin. But I especially value them given that they’re on my knuckles — the placement has a kind of subtle implication which I delight in. With them I both accept my fate and embrace it, and in doing that I’ve realized that fate isn’t something which I have no influence over. It’s a sort of “I know I can’t have your job, but I also don’t want your job.” Similar I suppose, but certainly without nearly as much resignation, to a cartoon character declaring “Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

The phrase is from the Kurt Vonnegut novel, Slaughterhouse Five. It’s the first novel where Vonnegut confronted his experiences with the Allied firebombing of Dresden during World War II. He emerged from a meat locker to find a desolate city. And, being that he was a prisoner of war, he and his fellow prisoners were charged with clearing the bodies out. Slaughterhouse Five is about more than his experiences in Dresden, but it’s not really what my mom would term a “happy story.” But Vonnegut handles it well, with humanity. With dignity and humor. His attitude is much how I’ve handled all of the various things I’ve gone through in my life.

I know life is pain, I know life is suffering. But life is also beautiful. Finding the beauty in tragedy isn’t a form of naivety, finding the humor in a terrible situation isn’t ignorance. It’s sometimes just necessary. Because if you can’t laugh at the end of the day, what do you have left? I don’t claim to have any sort of monopoly on suffering, I don’t deny other people their own suffering, I know that to be human is to suffer in some form or another. But for most of my adult life, my existence, my day-to-day life has been defined by suffering and pain, desolation, hopelessness, and despondence.

Vonnegut writing “so it goes” every time a character dies is just a truth. If there’s any point in living, if there’s any objective, it’s to make it to the end. The ultimate result of life is death, the ultimate result of a beginning is an end. Infinity defies our logic because it doesn’t make sense that something should have no beginning and no end. “So it goes” is not a hopeless statement to me, there’s no cynicism, no bitterness, it just simply states fact. And in stating face it’s become a soft of a rallying call for me. It’s more of a “yes, this terrible thing has happened, but you must move on and continue living life.” This is life. And life is suffering and pain, and life is also beauty. We don’t have a concept of an end with a beginning, we don’t have a concept of dark without light. And there’s a kind of relief in someone simply stating fact, no matter how obvious.

So I have my tattoo — stating the obvious and the hope of the obvious. It’s a way to say: some terrible things have happened to me, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop anytime soon. And putting them on my knuckles — that’s just perfect. It not only presents the opportunity to talk about it, but also is a sort of symbol — a consistent reminder not because I see them all the time, but because other people see them and ask me about them and so I can tell them. I can tell them: life is terrible and life is beautiful. And I’m going to keep going.

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