tikkun olam, tattoos, trauma, & Jamal
sometimes healing the world and healing yourself are the same thing. sometimes it involves eating oatmeal.
“Bleeding is totally normal. In fact, if you weren’t bleeding right now, I’d honestly be a little terrified and think, ‘Shit, this girl is not human,’ you know?”
My tattoo artist Ash offered these words of assurance to me on Saturday as I sat in her chair while she stuck tiny needles into my skin to make something beautiful and holy that is all mine come to life. “Is it supposed to be bleeding like that?” I asked her. It had been years since I’d gotten a tattoo that I could actually see being put on my body, and it was strange to be reminded that something that gave me pleasure and joy could make me bleed. Her response to me, as well as the feeling of something I love and care about being permanently put on my body, reminds me Oh yes, this is what it is to be human.
It’s the same thought that I had when I went to the Auschwitz exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage last Thursday, the day before my final restraining order court date against an abuser, to take my mind off of my own personal trauma. My nearly 80-year-old tanti from Italy suggested it, and I obliged. Only someone from my family would suggest an activity like this to take one’s mind off of trauma—swapping personal trauma with a larger context through which to experience the world if only for a few hours.
I indulged her, because as much as I’ve tried to escape my Jewishness through distance, I find myself connecting to the roots of my ancestors with every passing day, and how bad could it be? I thought. I’ve always loved and related to Anne Frank (at one point in kindergarten during a Seder prayer, I asked one of my teachers, Morah Tali, if she thought it was possible I could have been Anne reincarnated), the Book Thief (a story about a resilient little girl growing up in Nazi Germany and her love of books and writing) is one of my favorite books, and nearly half of my tattoos reference a concept from Judaism and are in Hebrew. What’s in my blood and my past is there, it’s part of my history, and I am constantly drawn to it, even if on the surface I like to brush away my Jewishness like it’s merely a corner of a quilt as opposed to the material used to sew it.
As soon as I stepped into the exhibit, seeing the same kind of Singer sewing machine my great grandma used in the old country, the map on the wall of the area of Poland and Ukraine where my ancestors escaped, the pictures of Dachau from where my relatives stood, I was reminded Oh yes, this is what it is to be human.
The day after going to the Auschwitz exhibit, I had my final restraining order court date in a process that sucked up eight months of my life, a lot of clarity and safety, and launched me psychologically and emotionally back to a mindset where I felt trapped and hopeless — back to a time when I wasn’t a person who knew how to cling deeply to the Small Joys and instead saw a bottomless pit of never-ending difficult circumstances where opportunity might have been. The day was difficult, but I found comfort in poetry, in the red lipstick I’ve been wearing since I was 16 that makes me feel brave, my friend Alex who held my hand both metaphorically and literally and accompanied me, and my amazing lawyer. Unfortunately, the day also ended with a painful fight with someone in my life, which left me feeling confused about why it is so seemingly simple for people to be unkind and uncaring towards one another, spending their lives focusing on their perspective instead of stepping outside of themselves to see a larger context.
Proud of myself but reeling from a lot of heightened emotions, I walked from the courthouse in Brooklyn to my office, which is only about 20 minutes away, because I needed comfort from someone familiar like my coworkers (but mostly because I’d needed to pee for like 6 hours). When the waterfalls of tears came crashing down, making their way into the world via the terrains of my face, I knew my body, for whatever reason, had been holding A Lot of Feelings captive for a very long time, and I let myself feel it. I cried for about an hour, as is usually the case with me (I conquer, I cry a lot, I move on…someone put it on a t-shirt for me), got a hug from my manager who told me it’s been incredible to watch me triumph over every trauma that has tried to rob me of my joy, wiped the smeared mascara from my face in the bathroom, and then went to a tiki bar with my friend and coworker Jamal, who I think I have to dub one of my official Hype Persons now after some of the pep talks and affirmations he’s given me lately. That was a long sentence, I apologize, reader—here, you’ll come to learn that although I am a short person (5’3 Club, baby!), I am not a brief person.
At the tiki bar I did one of my favorite things to do at any bar, which is ask the bartender for as many maraschino cherries as they will give me, because they are always somehow better coming in a personal cup or napkin at a bar where you’re supposed to be focusing on the drinks than when you buy a jar from a store. And then did one of my other favorite things (I have many favorite things, can you tell yet?) and talked through the Shit Going on In My Head with Jamal. The thing about Jamal is that he is not as much of an open book as I am, and I am a very, very open book. I am so open and vulnerable that if I was a literal book, I would probably be a Gigantic Almanac of Every Feeling That Has Ever Been Experienced In the World, somehow reality-defyingly open to every single page at once, with many colorful and precise depictions of every single feeling, and also the book talks, somehow, and cries a lot without ever wearing its pages to destruction or ruining itself with water damage.
But while I am an open book, I also have a hard time seeing things from outside of my perspective most of the time. Not in a selfish or ignorant way necessarily. But I have a really hard time wrapping my head around people who seem to like to argue, or people who say hurtful things instead of taking a moment to calm down during an argument and realize they don’t want to say that thing, or literally any mean action that someone does on purpose or maybe even unintentionally because they are not being self-aware. People who cannot step outside of themselves for a minute and realize that there is so much more going on than their own experience of things and that just because you are upset or hurt does not mean you have to be an asshole to someone else to avoid or cope with your own feelings.
I am a person who overthinks everything, and because I overthink everything, I very rarely start an argument with someone, I hold myself back from doing as many hurtful and thoughtless things as possible, and I always walk away when I could say something mean that I might regret later (unless you’re a Nazi or someone whose actions have truly hurt someone, then you don’t want to hear my Sailor Mouth and you certainly don’t want to feel the wave of regret I inspire as I scold you like a 90’s Soccer Mom who has managed to perfect her I’m Extremely Disappointed in You Voice).
Reader, this is not to say I’m perfect, or a Holy Unbelievably Good Person, because that would be a lie and a pile of bullshit. No one is that. But through many years of therapy, a lot of self-work, and because I have surrounded myself by friends and communities of people dedicated to growth and progress, I have learned to take space to heal not only myself but also the world through my responses to it.
I don’t believe there are Good People. That’s much too black and white for me. But I do believe in goodness. I believe there are people who make decisions. I believe that people wake up every day and have the opportunity to choose to be self-aware, to assess how their actions and words are affecting the world around them, and to actively choose to live their lives in a Net Positive, Ultimately Harm Reducing way that spreads as much Joy as possible, and minimizes causing hurt as much as possible. I believe there are people who choose to do kind things, which sometimes looks like bringing over a friend’s favorite cheesecake to them after they’ve had a really Horrible No Good Day, and sometimes looks like yelling at someone who has dehumanized someone else. There are variations.
There are people who, when they experience difficult things, whether it’s an argument, or a snide comment someone makes, or a traumatic event, acknowledge the pain or frustration something has caused, choose to make space for themselves to figure it out and heal, and are then able to grow from it and learn how to generate that healing into joy to positively affect themselves and others.
And then there are people who are more attached to thinking of themselves as kind people than they are to the actual action of putting that understanding of themselves into practice. There are people who avoid and minimize their own feelings and then end up taking them out on others later because they haven’t dealt with them, and then feel worse and stuck, which manifests into negative experiences both for them and the people around them. And then, finally, there are people who do not really think about these things at all, and are basically wholly living their lives for themselves and not thinking about the rest of the world, and whew boy may I just say I would love to live in a person like that’s brain for a day, because I cannot even begin to imagine.
All of that being said, Jamal is probably one of the only people I’ve ever talked to who has been able to take the way my brain works, explain to me how and why the way I think is different from the way that other people do, and then help me understand why people interact with the world the way they do without making me feel like I’m wrong for not operating from that same place.
And while Jamal is very good at boiling the world down and translating it for me, unfortunately the world often does not taste as good as a hard-boiled egg, or any other food that is boiled, and unfortunately the world often does not go down easily, even when taken with a spoonful of sugar (in oatmeal).
It is very, very difficult for me to accept that not only does not everyone operate from a space where they want to heal and grow and help the world instead of sitting in their bitterness or hurt, but that they’re not even thinking about it.
I know we all have our own things—our own Small Joys, Small Hurts, and then of course, the Big Things that really shape us—the things that inform how we react to and interact with the world. But it’s also about more than what’s affected us and what’s happened in our lives. I’ve often found that the way we live our lives and how much healing we are able to find not only for ourselves but how much healing we are able to create for others, big or small, is about the stories we tell ourselves to survive, to know ourselves more deeply, and to have reasons for why we do what we do. A tweet I love from my friend Gabriela says something brilliant that I think about very often, but she put it into words in the most succinct way.
The stories we tell ourselves may help us cope with the world and fit the narratives of who we want to be and how we like to think of ourselves, but it’s extremely important to learn that although you may be the protagonist of your own life, that does not always mean you are the hero.
You will do things that are wrong, or hurtful, or thoughtless. You will make mistakes. And that is okay. You can empathize with and build a narrative where you are not the hero, but a protagonist who fumbles, because you are Human, and a person looking to grow and heal. If you cannot fit a narrative into your life where you are not the hero, it is very likely that you will cause yourself and others grief on account of the fact that you are avoiding dealing with reality for the sake of comforting yourself. It is what it is.
About a week ago, pre-Auschwitz-exhibit-restraining-order-tattoo-and-tiki-bar, I sat in my kitchen with Jamal as we did work for our job on Sunday to prepare for a long week. As we talked through what we each felt we needed to successfully knock out our to-do lists for the following week, he made a comment that both made me laugh and question myself. Sometimes someone says something and it really holds a mirror up to you in the best and worst way. In order to tell a more accurate narrative about Who You Are, reader, it usually helps to have people in your life who will hold that mirror up to your story for you.
“When I get overwhelmed, I shut down and sleep but when you get overwhelmed, you somehow stay up for like 24 hours straight to still get your work done, you cry, tweet something viral both on your personal account and work account, get a campaign done, create a newsletter, write a few articles... which, great for you but I don’t know how you do it. Witchcraft?” he joked. He said something along these lines to me several times over the course of last week, about how I respond to difficult situations by throwing something back out into the world…I suppose out of amazement? Maybe out of a horror? It usually seems to be some combination of the two when people stare on at the way I live my life—constantly doing, constantly turning my anxious energy into something outside of myself—like they’re watching someone riding a bicicyle standing up and barreling aimlessly towards the Eye of Sauron. Or something like that.
And he was right to tease me, because over the course of last week, a week during which I was experiencing trauma and pain surrounding my restraining order, I did do all of those things he said I did. I cried. A lot. Both because of personal reasons and work-related stress. I stayed up a full 40 hours to finish a project I launched for work, and also because the asshole legislators and Governor in Alabama passed the nation’s most restrictive anti-abortion law ever, and I had some feelings and words about it so I ranted a lot on the internet, and then woke up and got paid to write several articles. I did have some tweets go viral. I did put together several newsletters and articles, get a whole campaign done, and still made time for myself to bake, cook myself some nice dinners, take some bike rides, and go to the gym.
I know that must sound like a lot. Or so I’m learning from people like Jamal, whose response seems to be “But how do you do all of these things all the time?” But to me, this past week was a pretty standard week. The only thing different about this one is that I also had a restraining order trial to get through, and was dealing with the re-traumatization of my body and mind reverting to my childhood self, feeling backed into a corner, trying to root me in an infantile state of curling up in a ball, petrified, crying. Minor thing, you know? (I joke).
Other than that, though, Jamal has a point about the bizarre way I live an Always Full life. I have always been like this. I react to life by doing everything. I don’t know how to sit still. Sometimes I wish to goodness I did. But that’s not me. I’m starting to learn that. I’m starting to like that about myself. The best thing about each of us is that there is something so essential and immovable about who we are that it makes us recognizable to each other. We are each an acquired taste. A palette of our own making.
And the best thing about getting to know someone, as I’ve been able to get to know Jamal the last eight months we’ve been friends, is witnessing them in their element and seeing how they respond to life. I didn’t recognize my response to life as a unique or bizarre one until friends like Jamal pointed out to me that most people don’t use up the anxious energy they have and translate it into Doing Good, which is fine, but I don’t know how to exist any other way. Maybe it’s a survival mechanism—a way to cope and feel like I am putting as many good things into the world as the awful things I have felt inside of myself. Maybe I’m just a person with anxiety who responds to that anxiety by trying my damndest to find joy.
I’m aware that not everyone is going to be helped by oatmeal or happy, re-fueling Small Joys the way I am. Not everyone reacts to life throwing a hailstorm of shit-covered knives at them (as my friend John recently described the latest unfoldings of my life to me) by doing a million things in a day and still cooking dinner at the end of it. Not everyone has the opportunity to be able to put the hailstorm of shit-covered knives being thrown at them into perspective to be able to turn their anxious energy or sadness or pain into something else.
I know that there have certainly been times in my life when I was not my most joyous or constructive self because I was experiencing poverty, or homelessness, or abuse, and I simply was not in a psychologically or physically safe mindset to be able to translate any energy into joy.
Either way, I’m not judging you for how you respond to life. And I’m not judging Jamal. Going to sleep when shit hits the fan, either in your brain or in the outside world, can be good. We all have to find ways to wake up in the morning and live our own. But recently, Jamal has reminded me that the really cool thing about friendship and People Who See You and Know You, is being able to see a clearer version of yourself through their lens, and being able to help someone see a clearer version of themselves through yours.
Later, during our conversation at the tiki bar, Jamal also said some of the nicest things that anyone has ever said to me (while also insulting oatmeal by calling it just the most okay food in the world, which I take as a personal offense). It is often hard to see myself outside of my trauma, and that I am often just a human being Trying to Survive, which means I often do not think of myself as someone who necessarily inspires joy in others.
I need other people to tell me these things, because otherwise, I get stuck in the idea that I am just another person, doing things, and not someone who has made some pretty big differences in lots of people’s lives merely by Being Who I Am. So when people tell me the things I do affect them in nice ways, it’s a small but great reminder to love myself, because I am making the world better inch by inch.
It has taken me a long time to love myself. I have had ups and downs in the process, as anyone does. I have experienced life events that shattered years of work on my self-confidence and worth in a second, triggering old beliefs that I am worthless and incapable of conquering hard things, and it took everything in me to rebuild it from scratch, and I have experienced months on end when I’ve conquered so many things that I couldn’t believe I could ever not love myself. It has taken me a long time to know myself, know what I need, and know what I don’t.
For that reason, two days after visiting the Auschwitz exhibit and one day after my restraining order court date, in Elly fashion, I woke up and spontaneously went to get a tattoo that I’d been waiting to get my whole life.
The tattoo, a beautiful and simple olive branch, which in a larger Biblical context represents peace and the culmination of a war, essentially, is accompanied by the words “tikkun olam,” (pronounced TEE-KOON OH-LUM) which is a large and complex concept (read more about it here) but can be summed up by the translation of “repair the world.” It’s defined by the idea that the world was made broken and is constantly torn up by war and other painful things, but that each person has the responsibility and opportunity to repair it, not only through Large Acts like joining social justice movements, but also through personal relationships and small actions, as well as the way you treat yourself.
Tikkun, literally to heal, is in the way you feed yourself so you have strength and nourishment to be yourself and live your life. Tikkun is in the way you listen to your friend after they’ve had a hard day, and you offer them advice or a shoulder to rest on. Tikkun is in the way you apologize and reform your actions after hurting someone. Tikkun is in giving yourself space to heal from yourself, and recognizing the ways in which you may need to heal the world from the ways you have behaved.
And so, after going to the Auschwitz exhibit and throwing myself into the deep end of the pool of the suffering of my ancestors and my people, and remembering how deeply angry I am about the Horrible Things People Have Done to Each Other in history and even presently as I type and you read, but still holding onto this fire at the core of who I am that will not renounce Hope or Joy, and then going through one of the most personally difficult days I have experienced in my life the very next day, it felt only appropriate that I tattoo my life ideal and philosophy, tikkun olam, next to a symbol representing peace, on my body. As Ash finished the tattoo, Don’t Look Back in Anger by Oasis started playing—a song that I could say just about perfectly sums up how I feel about my life and some of the more recent difficult experiences I’ve had.
So I start a revolution from my bed
'Cause you said the brains I had went to my head.
Step outside, summertime's in bloom
Stand up beside the fireplace
Take that look from off your face
You ain't ever gonna burn my heart out—And so Sally can wait, she knows it's too late as we're walking on by
Her soul slides away, but don't look back in anger, I heard you say.
It felt like a small sign from the universe. A Small Joy.
After reading this long diatribe, you might be wondering what the point I’m trying to make is, and considering how long and winding my sentences and stories are, that’s a very valid question. Mazel tov to you if you’ve read this far. My point, reader, is this:
Ultimately, I think there are seeds of Peace, and Joy, and Hope, and Goodness in all of us. Every single person. Even in Hitler. Even in the people who were not exactly “evil” per se, but they still built the railroads that transported innocent people from their homes to be killed in death camps. Even in people we love or might barely know who say unkind things because they are being unthoughtful.
I think that every day each of us has the opportunity to wake up and allow the environments we live in to harden us and do unkind things and make excuses about them, or find a way to choose tikkun olam. That doesn’t mean I think the choice is easy. In fact, the choice is often one of the hardest in the world, no matter how seemingly simple, because it requires you to de-center yourself, which is directly the opposite of what our human nature and evolutionary instincts tell us to do. I’ve often told friends I would take a bullet in a protest, or sacrifice my safety or freedom or autonomy if it meant sparking a ripple that could make a difference in the rest of the world, and that is true. I have done things for other people that have been the literal antithesis of what I need to do to survive in the world, and I have found a way to recover. And I have done small things that negatively impacted me but were for someone else’s greater good. It might have set me back an inch or two, but in the miles-long journey of life, I’ve found other ways to slingshot forward.
But the choice to act in a way that puts the greater good of the world or someone else’s life above yours causes cognitive dissonance, or great confusion, for most people. And that makes sense. It’s not easy to just want to de-center yourself, or even if it is, applying your values and ideals to how you live your life is even harder than wanting to do it. It is not a flaw if you have not figured it out yet. It has taken me years, and I am still learning.
So with that understanding, I’ll leave you with this. I am proud of you if you were able to heal the world in any small or large way today. I am proud of you if you thought about it and couldn’t figure out how to birth it into existence yet. I am proud of you if you are still trying to figure it out. I am proud of you if you’ve never thought about any of these things in this way before but feel curious and inspired to find a way to de-center yourself.
The truth is that tikkun olam is a complex and nuanced concept and practice. To heal the world does not always mean to literally go out and be a hero. Sometimes it just means to wake up and find your Small Joys, to find a way to want to live your life and be human, to take care of yourself enough that you can eventually do something that causes a ripple in the world. And if you’re not sure if you believe it’s in you, I want you to know that I do. I have seen people do and be horrible things, and like my friend Jamal pointed out to me, I have lived through some of the worst and most devastating traumas, and at the end of the day, in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
The miracle is not that I am not a jaded person or bitter person after all I’ve been through in life. It’s that I could be but continue to chose tikkun olam. The miracle is that we all have the choice of how we respond, instead of react, to our lives. The miracle is that, in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart, as Anne said. And, dear reader, I still believe in your ability to choose Joy.
Until next time.
Sincerely yours,
Elly
P.S. Before my therapy session on Sunday morning, I sat in the waiting room where an eight-year-old boy named Rey asked me to play the boardgame Sorry! with him. I said yes, because I am trying to say yes more, and he taught me how to play.
As we played, he had the option to bump me back or choose to help me continue to get ahead in the game. I told him that it was his choice. He could be altruistic or selfish, and I wouldn’t hold it against him. “We’re all just trying to get ahead in life, you know? So it’s okay if you want to choose to bump me back. I won’t judge you,” I said. And yet, again and again, he chose to help me so we both won. When his parents got out of their therapy session, they thanked me for playing with him. I told them he was very kind. They told me no one ever plays with him. It was a Small Joy that was actually a Big Joy, and got to what the core of this newsletter is about. We either give ourselves and each other permission to spread joy, or we hold ourselves back. Choosing that joy, if possible, can only help everyone win.
P.S.S. My friend Emily told me it’s only fair to put an oatmeal recommendation in these newsletters, so my favorite oatmeal this week was a tie between pumpkin pie and cherry chia pistachio. Go forth and make some oatmeal if you want or eat whatever brings you some Small Joy this week, reader. You are living a life and Being Human and that is enough reason to treat yourself.