joy
fuck salvador dali for being evil. that said, write a piece inspired by two famous dali paintings-- persistence of memory and the elephants. consider exploring movement, slowness/speed, heat/cold, and warped sensations.
In fall 2020 I tattooed the word “joy” into my left forearm using a sewing needle sterilized with a lighter and India ink. A few months later, summer of 2021, I accidentally took too high of a dose of Delta 8 I secretly ordered online, convinced the drug would fix my “broken brain”. These two things are seemingly unrelated, but the morning after my awful trip, feeling simultaneously heavy and disassociated from my body, my mother sat at the edge of my bed trying to comfort me, pointed at my tattoo, and said, “follow your joy.”
At the time, it was a phrase I’d begun to hear a lot online, from one particular person who’d seemingly “found their joy” after an ego death induced by months of solo traveling the United States, trying to fix their fucked up brain out of what I assume was the same desperation I felt at the time. I knew there was something better for me than my current circumstances, but I was unable to attain it due to restrictions imposed on the outside world and myself. Covid. My protective parents. My aversion to rebellion and unwillingness to be seen at all.
Outside my home, the world felt like a desert, but instead of an endless expanse of sand and sky, it was nothing but a concrete, urban sprawl I’d grown to despise, and even the sun shone like the moon — silvery and cold, grey like steel. I couldn’t seem to adapt in the way others could, even after 4 years physically living there, but still confined to a single room by that point.
Ironically, my “joy” tattoo doesn’t stem from a synonymous origin. It’s from a song. Joy by Thornhill, one of my favourite bands at the time, a band I still adore, specifically their first album that seems to bend space and time itself without the genre — metalcore — typically being something anyone would associate with distortion or reality. However, while I adore their debut album, The Dark Pool, their EP, Butterfly, holds a special place in my heart because of the song, Joy. At the time, no other song, at least sonically, spoke to me the way Joy did. I didn’t want to do anything except languish and wither away, after years of trying to find my voice, speak up for myself, yet being invalidated and ignored. Neglect is a strong word, so I won’t use it, but there’s a part of me that felt like that — neglected, at least emotionally and psychologically, a product of parents that had no real time, money, or energy for a child. Time passed so slowly yet so quickly. I couldn’t keep up. What difference did it make to do anything “productive” when it seemed to lead me nowhere? I wanted to follow my joy, but how could I when I didn’t know what that was, and when my environment held me back regardless of my mental condition?
The tattoo’s meaning has not changed, but has taken on more. It’s an anchor as much as it is a marker of an unhappy song during an unhappy time. An anchor because it’s grounding. A reminder that things do change as much as they stay the same — for when I don’t feel like I’m actually a person. I can still remember the rawness of my skin when trying to embed the ink into my skin, a feeble attempt at feeling some control over myself again. Perhaps the tattoo is the very tool I needed to lead me to my joy. And for that, I am grateful for it.