I did not become a radiologic technology student expecting to feel anything about it. I went in because it was practical. A licensed, stable path that fit into a much larger and messier five-year plan. I was not prepared to actually like it. I definitely wasn’t prepared to love it.

But somewhere between my first positioning lab and my first real patient in clinicals, something shifted.

There is a particular kind of quiet in an X-ray room. Everyone else on the floor is moving fast, and for the sixty seconds you have with a patient, it’s just the two of you and a machine that can see through skin. You learn how to talk someone through fear in a language that isn’t really language. More of a steady voice, a hand placed just so, the small choreography of “big breath in, hold it, and relax.” You learn to read a person’s body without ever asking them to explain it out loud. That’s not nothing. That’s a kind of intimacy most jobs don’t offer.

I think what surprised me most is how much of this field is about translation. A radiograph isn’t just an image. It’s a patient’s pain, made legible. It’s the difference between “something feels wrong” and here is exactly where. I’ve spent a lot of my life being the person who had to translate her own pain to doctors who weren’t always listening. Somewhere in a dim room with a lead apron on, I started to understand that I could be on the other side of that conversation now. I could be the person who does listen, who finds the thing, who hands someone else the beginning of an answer. Well, the eyes of the person who hopefully does that for them.

There’s an odd irony I think about more than I expected to. I left a job that was replaceable by AI for what might be one of the medical jobs AI ends up doing a lot of in the coming years. That’s not lost on me, and if I’m honest, it’s a little scary to sit with. I try not to dwell on it too long, but it’s there. I can see that AI will probably soon read radiograph better than any human eyes can. And more and more of what I do will become the snide comment of us just being there to take the picture.

Some days the hardest part isn’t the physical work. It’s the not-saying. The speak no evil curse you’ve willing embedded on your own soul. You see something on the image. You have a decent guess what it means. And you can’t say a word, because you’re the tech, not the radiologist, and it isn’t your place to name someone’s fear in that moment even when you can already see the shape of it. I’m still learning how to hold that silence without it costing me something. Because Lord Almighty I want to scream it sometimes. At the top of my lungs. Like a full on war cry so even the gods can hear your diagnosis (would that break HIPAA?).

There are also days the room itself gets to you. Stuck in the same four walls for hours, machine humming, door closed, no sunlight ten hours into a twelve hour shift. It starts to feel a little like being sealed into one of those Markiplier Iron Lung runs, just you and the walls and the low dread of not knowing what’s outside them. Dramatic, maybe. But anyone who’s spent a full shift in a windowless room will understand exactly what I mean. It’s a little like a submarine in some places. Lots of recycled air.

But underneath all of that is a joy I didn’t see coming: being handed a puzzle. A body that needs to be positioned exactly right, an order that needs to be interpreted, a problem with only one correct answer if you look closely enough. My brain, organizing, neurodivergent, always looking for the pattern, genuinely lights up for that part. It might be my favorite part of the whole job. Solving the puzzle.

That’s the part I didn’t expect to fall in love with. Not just the technology, not even the science, though both are genuinely fascinating. It’s the translation, the puzzle, and the strange privilege of being useful in someone’s worst hour in a way that’s precise and calm and kind, all at once.

I still have a long way to go as a radiologic technology student. But for the first time in a while, I’m looking forward to being tested.

Visual Storytelling In Ink

I see a map of the person I was fighting to become.

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.

A note: I’m a proud ambassador for Own Your Stigma — a community built on the radical idea that mental health struggles are not shameful. If this resonates with you, they’re worth knowing. Use code 25%OFFAMBASSADOR33 for 15% off.

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 Identity, Assumptions, And The Coming Out That Never Felt Like One

I’m bisexual. I wasn’t hiding. You just never asked.

I didn’t agonize over it. I didn’t lie awake confused. I didn’t have a slow dawning realization I had to sit with for years. It was just a thing that was true about me, the way being left-handed is true about some people, unremarkable and just sort of there.

Here is how it works, more often than people realize: the world looks at you and makes an assumption. In my case the assumption was straight. Nobody asked a follow-up question. Nobody left a gap in the conversation where a different answer could have fit. Straightness was just assigned, quietly, the way it gets assigned to most people, and then everybody moved on.

I didn’t correct it. Not because I was ashamed. Not because I was scared. But because it never came up, and bringing it up myself felt like making an announcement about something that didn’t feel announcement-worthy to me. It was just true. It had always been true. It felt strange to treat it like news.

Here’s what nobody tells you about being bisexual and quiet about it for a long time: eventually the silence starts to feel like a statement you didn’t mean to make.

By 29 I had been casually, undramatically bisexual for my entire adult life and had told almost no one. Not because of a closet. Not because of shame. Just because the moment had never arrived organically and I had never manufactured one.

And then I started to feel a pressure I hadn’t anticipated. A sense that I had waited too long, that not having come out formally by 29 meant I now owed people a bigger explanation than I would have at 19. That the delay itself required justification. That I had somehow done something wrong by simply existing without making an announcement.

The coming out scripts I had ever seen were designed for someone younger, someone in a family crisis, someone with something dramatic at stake. They weren’t designed for a 29 year old who just quietly knew and never made a thing of it and now felt weirdly obligated to perform a moment she’d never actually needed.

When I finally did it — finally said the word out loud in context, finally made it a declared thing — it was awkward. It was performative. It felt completely unlike me.

It felt like putting on a costume for an occasion I hadn’t actually planned to attend. Like reading lines from a script written for someone else’s story. The people I told were kind. The responses were warm. And I still felt, through all of it, vaguely like I was doing something wrong — not morally wrong, but tonally wrong. Wrong for who I actually am and how I actually move through the world.

I’ve thought about that a lot since. About the gap between what coming out looked like and what it felt like. About how the performance of it, however well-intentioned, managed to make the most authentically known thing about my identity feel suddenly foreign and strange.

Not intrusively. Not as an interrogation. Just — left space. Created room for an answer that wasn’t the default. Let the assumption be a question instead.

I wish the cultural script for coming out had a version that went: hey, this is just true about me, it’s always been true, it’s not a big deal to me personally, I’m telling you because I want you to know, full stop. No fanfare required. No milestone energy. Just a fact, shared between people who know each other.

If any part of this resonates — if you’ve been quietly, undramatically something for years and the idea of formalizing it feels more awkward than the thing itself — I want you to know that’s valid. There’s no deadline. There’s no minimum level of drama required. Your identity doesn’t owe anyone a performance.

You can come out in a blog post at 29. You can come out in a conversation. You can come out by simply not correcting an assumption anymore. You can do it however it actually feels like you, because the whole point is that it’s yours.

If you or someone you know needs support, The Trevor Project provides 24/7 crisis intervention for LGBTQ+ youth.

On Choosing A Field That Chose Me Back

Visual Storytelling In Ink

On Identity, Assumptions, And The Coming Out That Never Felt Like One