I didn’t realize until recently that my tattoos tell one continuous story. To me they were just always little marks that I had dreamed about since I was a child. It didn’t matter to me that my family was very anti-tattoo. I could see the art and weight each strike of ink carried. And I knew that I was going to at least have seven of them. Each tattoo meaning something specific. Each one chosen with intention.

I got my first one at eighteen — impulsive, maybe, but also the most honest thing I had ever
done. It was the tattoo I knew I wanted the most. Over the years, more followed. Each one felt separate at the time: a checklist item here, a symbol there, words pressed into skin because I needed them close. But when I look at them together now, I see something I didn’t plan. I see a map of the person I was fighting to become. All before I even was old enough to put all of that together.

In Perpetuum et Unum Diem — ribcage

Forever and one day. I was eighteen when I got this, and somehow I already knew. We carry things with us. The grief, the love, the versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown but haven’t quite let go of. That John Locke may have had a point about us being a sum of our memories.

This Latin phrase lives on my ribcage — close to my lungs, close to my breath — because the things that matter don’t leave us. They just change shape. Learning to carry them gently is its own kind of strength. Learning to live with them is how you end up fulfilled.

Second Star to the Right — behind my ear

Peter Pan. A movie that on its own I am actually not a huge lover of. However, it had one symbol so prominently perfect that I thought I must have it — in my own style. Behind my ear, small enough to be a secret, meaningful enough to be permanent.

This one is a promise I made to myself: to never let the world fully harden me. To hold onto wonder, play and childish imagination. To protect the part of me that still believes in magic, still finds joy in small things, still remembers the dragon on her childhood bedroom wall and wanted to fly.

The world will try to take that from you. Growing up is often just a slow, polite way of being told your softness and wonder is inconvenient. This tattoo is my refusal to submit to a reality where we forget to giggle.

Semicolon — wrist

You already know what this one means. A semicolon is used when a sentence could have ended, but didn’t. The author chose to continue. I chose to continue. That’s all I’ll say about that — and it’s everything. Because I want to remind everyone that no matter how hard things are one thing will always remain true — change. It’s the most real guarantee we can have.

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Jewish Star with Buddhist Ties — ankle

I have never fit neatly into one box. When I was a kid I didn’t fit in well with the Jewish community around me. When I was older I didn’t fit in with other communities well because I was Jewish. It felt like écartèlement. This tattoo is my peace with the idea that fitting into one neat box was never really supposed to be the goal in the first place. The goal was always just finding your own moral character.

My Jewish roots run deep — the culture, the history, the sense of belonging to something ancient and resilient. And Buddhism found me when I needed a framework for the interior life: impermanence, compassion, the practice of presence. These two things coexist in me. This tattoo says: you are allowed to hold more than one truth at a time. Complexity is not contradiction. It’s just being whole.

Milton Quote — arm

“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” — John
Milton, Paradise Lost

This one is the one people ask about most. And the answer is simple: I put it on my arm because I needed to be able to see it. I have been through my own hell. I pulled myself out of it — slowly, imperfectly, with a lot of help and a lot of stubbornness. And there are so many times when I feel like I am literally back in the swamp.

So when it came time for me to finally get the John Milton tattoo I always wanted I switched lanes. I didn’t go for the romance and poetry. I went for the visual reminder I can always see for myself. The way is long. The way is hard. But there is light at the end, and you are already moving toward it.

—

Gentle Strength was never just a name. It’s the thing I’ve been practicing my whole life — learning to be soft and strong at the same time, to survive without becoming hard, to carry my story without being crushed by it.

These tattoos are the proof that I’ve been working on it for a long time. And I’m still working on it. That’s the whole point.

On Maslow, Identity, And The Long Road To Becoming The Healer

Not the absence of edges. The decision about where to put them.

Not maliciously — at least not always. More in the way someone says it when they mean you are direct. Blunt. That social graces do not come naturally to you the way they seem to come naturally to everyone else in the room. That you say the thing. That you don’t cushion it first.

I spent a long time trying to figure out what to do with that. You can only intend to be okay with it so much as a kid? When really you are sitting there in the corner of the room alone wondering what went wrong that you turned out so different. Did you watch too much Star Trek with your grandpa?

You’ve probably seen Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The pyramid. Physiological needs at the base — food, sleep, safety. Then belonging. Then esteem. And at the top, the peak that most of us spend our whole lives pointing at without ever quite reaching it: self-actualization. Fulfillment. Becoming the fullest version of yourself.

What I’ve noticed is that most of us never get there. Not because we aren’t trying. Because we spend so much time managing the lower levels — surviving, proving ourselves, looking for belonging in places that don’t quite fit — that we never get to ask the question that actually matters. Not what do I want to do. But who do I actually want to be.

For a long time I thought I had the answer. I was going to be a humanitarian lawyer. The asshole in someone else’s corner when they needed one. A Romulan — if you’ll allow me this — operating in the shadows for good. Sneaky. Strategic. Willing to do the complicated moral math that other people preferred not to think about.

I liked that version of myself. She was competent and sharp and she knew exactly what she was for.
And then I realized I didn’t actually want to be a lawyer. And that version of myself collapsed.

After that came what I can only describe as my Klingon phase. If I couldn’t be the strategic long-game player maybe I could just be the warrior. Live short but gloriously. Enter the halls of Valhalla. Fulfill a childhood dream of burning bright enough that it didn’t matter how long it lasted.

I understand now that this wasn’t ambition. It was bargaining with grief. It was what happens when you lose the story you were telling yourself about who you were going to be and you reach for the most dramatic alternative available.

It wasn’t self-actualization. It was the opposite. It was a performance of purpose designed to avoid the question underneath it.

The thing that changed everything was a Coursera class. The Science of Wellbeing by a Yale professor named Laurie Santos. I took it on a slow afternoon with no particular expectations and because it reminded me of a silly off comment I once made about wanting to be buried under Yale library. And it quietly rearranged something in me.

What the research actually shows — not what we’re sold, not what looks good on a vision board — is that purpose and fulfillment don’t come from money or status or achieving the specific job title you had in mind at twenty-two. They come from something more interior and more relational than that.

I started asking different questions. Not what do I want to accomplish. But how do I want to move through the world. What kind of presence do I want to be for other people. What community do I want to build and belong to.

And answering those questions — actually sitting with them instead of reaching past them toward the next achievement — led me somewhere I didn’t expect.

The Healer

It led me to healthcare. Not the frontline fighter. Not the strategist in the shadows. Not the warrior going down in flames. The healer. The backline support. The one in the RPG party who doesn’t always get the glory but is quietly the reason everyone else is still standing.

And I had to sit with that for a while. Because there is a voice — and maybe you know this voice — that says support is lesser. That if you’re not the one at the front taking the hits you are somehow less essential. Less important. Less.

Women have been showing up as quiet strength for decades. The backbone. The hand on someone else’s back in the moment when they need it most. The person who notices what everyone else is too busy to see. That is not a supporting role. That is the role that makes everything else possible.

I am still blunt. I still say the thing. Social graces are still a conscious effort rather than a natural instinct.
But I have found what to do with it. I am the asshole who shows up for you. The one in your corner when you need someone who will tell you the truth and stay anyway. The one who will do the complicated moral math and hand you the answer without making you feel small for needing it.

That is my gentle strength. Not the absence of edges. The decision about where to put them.

And getting here — to this answer, to this version of the question — required losing the stories I had about myself first. The Romulan. The Klingon. The lawyer. The warrior.

What was left underneath all of them was the healer. She was there the whole time.

Visual Storytelling In Ink

On Maslow, Identity, And The Long Road To Becoming The Healer