Heart on My Sleeve

On tattoos and my Arkansas Grandmother's hallway and loving and fighting

I got a tattoo in early December of the Sacred Heart. This is tattoo number 5, and I tend to get tattoos at times of crisis. I was raised Catholic, though I’ve been a Buddhist for twenty years, and now I’m … I don’t know. I’m still both, and neither, and I’m a little lost. I’m at a transition point.

I’ve been trying to pray more, though to what I don’t know, but that’s okay. Prayer is like mothering is like grief: the act of making yourself bigger than you can be to contain the things you cannot carry and to make space for the things you need. And writing, too, is like this: imagining an audience that will want to hear what you don’t even know how to say.

We are doing the next right thing. I think I’m in a mood like after a car accident where I just want to ask whether everyone is okay. Am I okay? I had a doozy of a week last week that involved having to yell at people to make sure that my husband’s discharge plan was more careful than the one developed by people who are paid to do such things. I had to intervene and make an earlier appointment, then leave what felt like millions of panicked voicemails and tell people things like, “This is the new appointment. This is how things are going to work.” I had to throw my shit in the car at a moment’s notice and drive six hours to get home and deliver a laptop and phone to where my husband was so he could do an intake. I had to pray that certain policies would not be followed to the letter and rely on the good graces of staff who saw the bigger picture. There was then massive confusion and no one seemed to know which app was being used for the intake, then no one knew where the email invite was, and then someone was in a meeting. I then drove back down to where my husband was and told people I was waiting outside so that if all their systems failed, I would drive him to the intake myself. Some people kinda laughed and implied, “Oooh you’re a doozy, honey, aren’t you? Things will work out.” And I left angry messages because the only way this worked okay was me. So I’m worn out, and I felt a little embarrassed to have to push so hard, but I also know that sometimes you just do, especially in complex systems where rules seem designed to foil the actual work of healing.

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My main job right now, with all of this upheaval, is not to compare myself to other people, to not inhabit a critical audience who thinks I’m too much, too loud, too whatever. I also have been struggling not to trace back and ask if things would be different if I had done something different. People do fucked-up shit, and sometimes shit just breaks. I am trying so hard to not make it be about me. That is harder, I think, because I’ve also been through stuff in a past abusive relationship where everything was made explicitly about me.

This is also my beef with a certain dominant strand of Catholicism, with that strain of thinking that says that you are inherently sinful and you get what’s coming to you. Both of those tendencies float around in my heart as the first response to any challenging thing the world offers me: if I was just better, bad things wouldn’t happen, or they wouldn’t bother me.

Fuck that noise.

What saved me, in both cases, was to allow myself to be incandescently angry. My heart is decorated with flowers but it’s also on fire.

My German immigrant grandmother in Arkansas went to Latin mass every day, and her house was filled with gory crucifixes, lots of eyeballs rolling upward in suffering and crowns of thorns. I guess it’s no surprise that I gravitated toward the non-scary images: Mary and the Sacred Heart. The plaster Sacred Heart statue was in the hallway near the phone. Jesus held open his robes, quite unconcerned, almost chill, to reveal his actual heart glowing out of his chest. I like the paradox of the Sacred Heart, the way it shows a physical impossibility, a union of passion and calm. It reminds me: this is love and oohh, that’s gotta sting.

This one isn’t exactly right. All I remember is that the heart of my Grandmother’s statue was so glowy and almost orange-red that it looked like a nectarine I wanted to bite. C’mere, Jesus, eat your heart out.

The crucifixes themselves were symbols marking intense theological debates: essentially, such images are the most forceful rhetoric for those who had context to understand such debates. The suffering depicted is, according to some thinkers, supposed to be a warning about what can happen to truth tellers, and the violence is supposed to remind us of the cruelty of the world, to make us feel compassion for Jesus.

But what those images do to children who have no context is another matter. To me, as a child, those images served as a threat: this is what happens, this is what can happen, if you’re not good. The complexity of Jesus being good and punished unfairly and suffering because he loved humanity … all those concepts require a layering of several ideas and mysteries that children just don’t have access to. I am a lay person just thinking about the images I encountered. There are centuries of debate about why the image of Jesus on the cross has to be so violent. I did find this interesting article from the Unitarian Universalists about the transition in the images toward the gothic during the Middle Ages. (I was also a UUer—of course.)

There’s something about the Sacred Heart, on the other hand, that reminds me where my center is: in love, and in feeling emotions, even if they sting a little, like doing open heart surgery on yourself would definitely sting. And the image encapsulates a kind of vulnerability and courage, a nudge to bear my actual heart to the world. I have needed this image recently to not get swallowed in bitterness and fear. The Sacred Heart, for me, is emphatically not about sainthood. Jesus is hanging out with his WHOLE heart out of his robes.

My sense of WTF about spirituality comes from the fact that I think I have used the centering discipline of both prayer and meditation to avoid the feeling of my heart leaping out of my chest, to contain the feeling of heartbreak. But I’ve also been really really helped and changed by the Buddhist instructions to basically let your heart break and get bigger until it contains the world (a tall order, but good for a goal). These practices helped me bear and move through great pain by understanding that the pain, like everything, was fluid. But it’s also possible to use anything in the world as a kind of spiritual bypass. We can do any ritual for the calm and comfort it provides, which can also offer a method for explicitly courting numbness.

Up above my Sacred Heart on my left arm is a tattoo on my shoulder of Vajrayogini, a fierce dharma protector deity. And I have been warned through teachings of many teachers in my lineage about “idiot compassion,” described by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche as acting in a way that seems “helpful” but that won’t do anyone any good and also that serves more than anything to blunt your own discomfort. I’ve definitely been a practitioner of idiot compassion, being nice and understanding when I should have set fires and run for the hills. (Many people attribute the phrase to Trungpa but I saw a few references to this coming first from Russian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff whose name keeps coming up in my life and who I don’t know much about.)

There’s a way you can use anything, I think, to smooth your soul toward a kind of ideal of who you want to be, to swallow anger or hone it to a point, without really feeling it and processing it. To avoid what needs to be done or said. In Al-Anon we talk about the dangers of martyrdom. I do think in past situations I have put up with too much because I was attending so carefully to the advice to not do violence with one’s words and actions that I pressed all my emotions into white hot pellets, and then I just carried those around, and they accumulated and got heavier and heavier. Sometimes silence is more violent than any scream or smash.

This time around, I am trying to wear my heart on my sleeve. And that has meant some ugliness. Because my tendency is to swallow anger, I’ve tried to express it. It’s been messy and I’ve said some mean shit and apologized. I think, just for me, that that’s better than not saying it at all. I have been so programmed to freeze, to watch as other people do things that hurt me, and then to choose from a careful and limited array of appropriate responses: I’ll go for a walk. I’ll write. I’ll clean something. I’ll say nothing. I’ll take the high road. I’ll do a meditation where I take on the person’s pain and wish it would disappear.

I am figuring out that it is much more alive to deal with the real consequences of my real anger than to not feel it at all, or to feel immediate shame for being angry. I don’t want to care so much about being a good person that I fail to be a person at all. I get to fail. I get to have impact. I get to make true messes. I’d rather own them than spend my life feeling like I’m biting my tongue. And like tattoos, those things I do in the real world have impacts on me; they stay with me. I don’t feel the desire for vengeance increasing. Instead, I look back on that small list of angry actions and think: okay, that’s enough. I see the person I am in my worst moments, and honestly, it’s good to know she’s there. I like that she’s there.

I also like that my tattoo has a kind of spout, with fire coming out the top, like it might be a molotov cocktail. And that reminds me of a postcard that’s been hanging in my stairwell since we moved, and before that has hung in every place I’ve lived:

My heart is a muscle the size of my fist. It’s on my sleeve. It gets stronger the more I use it. Feeling things hurts, but the alternative is to have your heart stop beating. We are going to need even more of what we love in the next year. We need to talk about what we love and want as well as what we fear.

Right now I have small and significant reasons for hope, for forward motion. My husband seems (tentatively, knock wood) to be on an upward slope. I hesitate to say I am hopeful, because I have used hope, or hope has used me, to tolerate what I shouldn’t have tolerated. “Hope” is a weird word, like “love,” those four-letter words that are so hard to define. Maybe instead of feeling hopeful, I will say that I am doing better each day too.

When people ask how I am doing, my joke reply inside my head is “I’m feeling my feelings.” It is funny to me because it really is so much work, and also it’s the opposite of a standard reply, and yet it is kind of a great reply because it gives as little information as “fine,” but it’s about process instead of product.

My heart is a muscle the size of my fist. I’m gonna keep loving and keep fighting.

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I turned on the thing where you can donate if you want. You don’t need to, but I wanted to make sure that Substack didn’t imply that you have to pay for this content. That’s not what I’m after. I’m hoping it functions like a tip jar, but if it implies otherwise I might have to go in and fix something. Anyway, thank you for reading. I’m not gonna paywall this stuff—I appreciate you for being with me in this conversation. As I’ve written about before, this kind of stuff doesn’t happen without you.