Here's a stick of dynamite, should you choose to accept it

I am at a nail shop and a girl asks me the meaning of my tattoos. The rehearsed answer falls through my lips like water at 3am. This one means clarity, this one means my siblings, this one means, this one means, this one means, this one. But I have decided to live a more honest life, and what better way to start than answering the question I lie about the most. Come closer and let me whisper a truth to you. My tattoos mean absolutely nothing, at least individually. My tattoos in a sense are a form of protest. Think, a message from the innermost version of myself that is constantly under attack from the person I become when I walk out my house. A secret message from an alter ego who leaves behind amnesia and an anxious feeling that this is not who you ought to be.

I see an article published on the New Times that speaks to the performative tendencies of Kigali people. The author merely scratches the surface of this festering wound, but it is enough to spark conversion on a battle I have been fighting internally since I was old enough to join the cast. For girls, this begins at birth. 

I was quite an immature little girl, and I use “maturity” in a derogatory way here. I didn’t understand rules that didn’t make sense and when things didn’t make sense I pretended they did not exist. This is something I have kept with me as I got older, at least backstage. Lately, when it comes time for me to get dressed and step out into the world and face my audience, I call back the rules that don’t make sense. I smile way too much even when there ain’t shit to smile at. I try, and sometimes fail, to curb my anger when nonsense is going on because God forbid you cause a disruption in this play. I keep my hair a certain way because I fear the looks the pink haired girl gets even though my Pinterest is nothing but her. I speak less of injustice and more about joining organizations that do just enough good that I can sleep at night but not enough that I end up unemployed. I write characters my younger version would scoff at. If I could face my younger self today she would kiss her teeth at my cowardice and I would lecture her about the price of growing up. Luckily, my childhood rage/immaturity was not without foresight. 

I am at a tattoo shop at the cusp of maturing. 18 years of age where people start asking who you want to be as though who you already are is of no significance. I get it on the most visible part of my body. I don’t care much for the design. What I care about is that it must be too big to hide. I want it to be a beacon. “You can’t hide!”, it must scream. These tattoos are a protest from my younger and braver self. A final desperate attempt at saving her own life. A refusal to be ignored and tucked into a box I can only access on future drunken nights where all I can talk about is myself in the past tense. I get tattoos because they are unruly. They make mothers at wedding receptions clutch their rosaries, and they make a certain demographic of men deeply uncomfortable. They are a refusal to be palatable. I get them as a type of armor, because I am not yet strong enough to shield myself from the airborne disease that is performance, that is conformity, that is individual death. I am but one person, born into a species that cannot survive alone, into a world that puts a price on community. I am not strong enough to fight the tides. I fear loneliness and isolation, and that is the price one pays for daring to be different. This is what the article does not speak about. The price of individuality in this mutated society. A price that understandably not many can afford to pay. I am privileged in that I was braver once, and the food at my table is not dependent on how many claps I receive from my audience. But I am still human, I am afraid and I want to be loved and accepted. I did not know this when I walked into that shop, and had I known this, maybe my tattoos would have looked different or maybe they would not have looked at all.

I am sat with a man whose tattoos scatter on his skin in a way that never reaches past the outline of a work appropriate tee-shirt. He has lived a decade longer but he holds more fear than me. He looks at me as though I am somehow braver and bolder than him. Like there is something innate about me that keeps me more whole. Oh, how wrong he is. I am a coward draped in a lion’s mane. I tell him that I simply made it impossible to be anything but what I am. Like a could-be soldier cutting off their arm in protest to a draft. I tell him to color outside the lines in permanent ink and just live with the consequences. The road ahead becomes a little easier to take when you throw a stick of dynamite behind you with each step you take. You’d be surprised at how the world doesn’t end when you are brave enough to exist outside the lines. 

I am sitting with my mother and a tailor who is telling us about her upcoming marriage as she measures me for a wedding I am to be a part of. The tailor looks at me and says that I am beautiful but my tattoos make me essentially unmarriable. She worries for my future and the harmony of my relationship with my inlaws. Prior to this, my mother has never spoken about her thoughts on my tattoos. She would shake her head but otherwise stay silent. In this conversation she finally speaks about her fear of me never building a family. I should have felt angry at the sadness in her eyes, but instead I felt grounded. Don’t get me wrong, the anger was there. The disappointment of being a disappointment was palpable. But a big part of me felt true for the first time in my adult life. Like I had done something truly right. 

This armor of mine has helped me stay true to myself, in some ways. It has helped me find the people who find beauty in protest. Who wear pink hair, and pierce parts of themselves that would make pastors faint. They write words that would make a grown man blush, and they laugh fully, without care of who listens. And at night, when the moon is high and night has a chill that has us huddled close, we whisper of our fear of being lost. Of leaving one day and coming back the next, a stranger to ourselves. We create and experience and exist in protest together and the world does not end. 

And so I leave you with this question, what is your tattoo? Who are you when no one is watching and do you dare to bring them out into the light?