(no subject)
So I was feeling kind of burned out monday, I had an exceptionally long week coupled with not really having had a weekend the previous week because of the long drive to alabama (go figure that it takes a long time to drive all the way across the country, eh?). I didn't particularly feel like working and did a small star on the back of a girl's neck at the beginning of the day and wasn't super interested in doing a lot more, I was just really tired and wanted to go home and sleep. So spanky, chris and I went to get lebanese food and when we get back, there's a lobby full of people and marty's gesturing at some women in the lobby who want to get tattooed and immediately I have this inward sigh of "ugh I have to do something instead of eat this delicious food I just got" but I didn't really not want to work at all that day, so I came up and started talking to her, a middle-aged woman and her daughter, very nice people. She'd been thinking about getting a tattoo for a long time but just decided to kind of randomly that day. She wanted a cherry blossom branch, so I went and quickly drew one for her and came back and she was really happy with it, saying it was exactly what she had in mind. Now here's the really cool part about this: She'd had a double mastectomy after having had a lumpectomy a while back, after watching her mother die from breast cancer that spread to her lymph nodes. She'd had one removed, and then later the other but by the time they found it in the other it'd already spread. so she just pre-emptively got them both removed, along with four lymph nodes. they didn't find it in the lymph nodes, but did in both breasts, so pre-emptively removing them significantly prolonged her life! She opted out of reconstructive surgery because she just didn't feel the need for it, and the cherry blossom branch (which can be symbolic of female strength) was going to go right underneath her scar as both a memorial and a symbol that no matter what our society conveys, you don't need breasts to be a woman.
When she sat up and saw it, she just smiled and got up and gave me a hug, and it was just really one of the best things I think I've done. The tattoo turned out well but being able to do something like that for somebody is honestly one of the best gifts doing what I do gives me. Being able to do that for people means more to me than any amount of social psych research I ever would have done and I could write a hundred papers about what it means to be a woman nowadays and how we can achieve personal strength and it never would have come close to that. No matter what bullshit I put up with day-to-day and how many people come in who want some OE lettering on their neck or something, getting to have experiences like that make it constantly amazing.
When she sat up and saw it, she just smiled and got up and gave me a hug, and it was just really one of the best things I think I've done. The tattoo turned out well but being able to do something like that for somebody is honestly one of the best gifts doing what I do gives me. Being able to do that for people means more to me than any amount of social psych research I ever would have done and I could write a hundred papers about what it means to be a woman nowadays and how we can achieve personal strength and it never would have come close to that. No matter what bullshit I put up with day-to-day and how many people come in who want some OE lettering on their neck or something, getting to have experiences like that make it constantly amazing.