STAR KIND: the story of my knuckle tattoos, or how I came to know I was not inherently unlovable
By a stroke of great luck I landed at a hippie commune in the Ozarks the week the world shut down for the pandemic. I was 11 months sober, and still a barely functioning human with unprocessed traumas galore, a new conviction of sobriety, and a deep feeling of gratefulness to be nestled at the confluence of the North Fork of the White River and the grand watershed, Lick Creek. Course, here now, three years later, I have a better view of the gifts and the curses of the commune.
The commune had an unofficial slogan: “We give you enough rope to hang yourself with.” It’s rather implied that one might also do something worthwhile with the rope, but it’s not directly offered. Mostly I found that people did hang themselves, metaphorically of course, with addiction, self-harm, are abused and abusing, and have a deep “don’t tread on me” sort of attitude. I often felt that the long term members were stuck in the Bill-Clinton-as-President years, and still considered themselves incredibly radical. The ethos of the longer term members didn’t experience 9/11, the housing collapse, the rise of the internet, cell phones, Black Lives Matter or the emergence of gender non-conforming folks …. and it’s not safe for POC or queer people there at all.
That all said, I used my noose as a rope to pull myself into a much healthier mode. I learned an immense amount of skills, I spent deep work on my mental health, I made terrific, life long friends, I kayaked almost every Ozark river, a bunch of creeks, and walked hundreds of miles of incredible Ozark land. I learned to play games, I survived the pandemic in relative safety, I developed a relationship with my body’s strength that was a true gift, and I lived without internet or a cell phone for almost two years. Much loveliness!
In addition to learning the ins and outs of running a peanut butter factory, being the manager of the Plumbing and Electricity department, serving on the medical committee and running the woods naked like a wild animal, I trained new-comers in how to work the garden. This garden does a lot of feeding for the up to 70 members on the commune at any given time and is run by a super savant naturalist named Richard.
It’s deep August Missouri heat, which is to say we are both blistering and swimming in an ooze of 99% humidity. There is no cooling off possible, and we’re doing the worst job in all farm labor: harvesting potatoes.
A woman arrives late to the field holding a chipped-paint shovel in her perfectly manicured, pale hands. She is dressed in a pale pink chiffon pajama, her lips a glimmering glossy pink pout. On her face, little glued jewels sparkle in the August sun. Richard and I meet eyes and internally groan. We see a lot of ‘visitors’ come through, and it’s generally pretty obvious whether or not they are cut out for the brutal labor of the farm life right away. This cupcake forgot her parasol.
She introduces herself as Moon. She has the round white face to match, she is astonishingly beautiful. I’m annoyed. She does no work, lifts no surly bags of fresh potatoes, digs no trenches unearthing the roots, hauls no carts up the treacherous hill to the mess hall, but does tell the sweating and red-faced crew instead all about how she’s a healer and can heal anything about ourselves at all in just one hour of working with her.
Ha ha ha ha ha, goes my sinister Jabba the Hut laugh. Really? Moon. In just ONE HOUR. I eyeroll so hard I get a concussion. I get a little sinister. So I decide to fill out her little form and enroll in her FREE! session, and when asked what I would like to change about myself, I am ready with the biggest, hardest, most unsolvable wound of my life. I write: I want to stop believing that I am inherently unlovable.
She reacts as though I’d said I want to start flossing or quit eating oreos. Just a gauzy wave of white arm and that enchanting smile under her wet eyes. “How’s Sunday after brunch?” Sure, Moon, sure.
We meet at the mess hall, un-ironically called “Rock Bottom.” She’s glowing and fresh as ever. As much as a judgy bitty as I’m being, I have to admit there is something to the woman. I can feel it in the space that never lies to me. So we go to my room, sit on my bed. On the commune, there is absolutely no privacy, but the bedroom is closest.
She asks if I am ready to begin. I hesitate, and she says “Oh, I see you are not.” Her words struck some cord in me, and suddenly I was ready, and open to the idea that this might actually work. I surrendered myself to her path and released everything but her guidance.
The situation becomes a cocoon, Moon takes me time traveling back down my life’s lineage to just barely visit and touch every time I ever felt inherently unlovable. When my partner didn’t take care of the sick dog the way I hoped. When my boss yelled at me and I curled up in a ball. When my partner threw me against the wall and I hid outside in the bushes. When my mom wouldn’t come to my college graduation party. When my first husband built walls to keep all my family and friends out. When my grandfather died, when my best friend lost his mind, when the junior high hot girls chose me as their target, when my ear was so infected and I got no help, when my mom left me at stranger’s houses for weeks at a time, when I was watching my mom in violent fights with her new husband when I was four years old and had just buried my dad.
In each event, Moon would hold me in the memory, nurture my tears and then have me zoom out into deepest space where I was safe and could see the event from far far away. Little did she know I always wanted to be an astronaut. That I imagined Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan as my secret fathers. That this was the safest place she could possibly send me.
She brought me back again to the fighting event at four with my mom. Each time it became overwhelming to relive it, she would send me back starward, and then again to the moment. I came to see this moment was when the idea of being inherently unlovable took root. That it was because I wasn’t getting what I needed to feel loved. And I saw that part of why that was happening was because I could not speak what I needed to my mom.
I needed to say: this fighting makes me scared, i need you to stop drinking, i need you to leave this abuse, I need to feel safe, I need to feel seen and valuable, I need a hug, I need to know you love me.
Of course, I was four. It makes sense to not have the words then. But the wound kept me from having words for decades. As soon as someone I cared about might leave, might be angry, might exist, my words dissipated, and I became the void. I realized that part of the reason I felt unlovable was because I had never voiced what I needed to be loved.
So Moon took me back into the depths of cold space, and then back to that moment one last time. She invited me to speak to my young mother what I needed. Then we bounced the timeline back up to the present and saw that in each of those situations, I had never spoken my truth to the people I loved. Moon invited me to speak all of my truths in that time we spent together, and I did. And Moon held that sacred, safe, loving space for me.
I had felt inherently unlovable because I had been unable to share my needs with people I loved. They never had a chance to know me because I never risked sharing what I needed most.
In that moment of epiphany, Moon told me she loved me. And I believed her, it felt like the first time I ever believed anyone loved me. I was an astronaut and she was my glorious Moon. Moon loved me and in accepting that, in her hearing me speak my needs so intimately, I found I loved myself for the first time.
What Moon’s therapy session opened to me was a realization that as a small child, I was unable to speak my needs. I didn’t know how to tell my mom that I wanted the abuse to stop. I didn’t know how to speak aloud my needs, or even, really, what my needs were. I was just a kid who felt terrible. I made an assumption that everything was terrible because of me. I began to believe (once I had more complicated words) that I was poison, and everyone who cared about me would suffer immense pain. In my innocence, I pegged myself as the guilty party, even though I couldn’t even speak those words because this was all feelings. The feelings of a child.
The session illuminated to me that I had developed a pattern of NEVER speaking my needs with those closest to me, because I couldn’t when I was very small. So, carrying that into adult situations ensured that I could never get what I needed out of life, partnerships, love, work, because I could never speak my needs. I froze, I fawned, I placated, I appeased, I relinquished my worth. In fact, I couldn’t be properly loved because I wasn’t allowing the ones I loved to actually come to know me. I wouldn’t tell them.
Perhaps, in fact, I really was inherently unlovable as long as I was unwilling to risk being fully known, unwilling to risk expressing my needs and desires. But on that day, with Moon’s hands in mine, I promised myself that I would take that chance, and realized that I did love myself all along. I awoke to that I was lovable, if in fact I would allow it.
We floated together back into the deeps of space. It was peaceful. I loved myself finally, which was the ultimate proof that I was lovable. We wrote down two phrases during that session, love is a wealth of pain, and starkind. Starkind symbolized this shared moment of Moon and I loving one another and recognizing the infinite connection within us. These things sound obtuse in the telling, but the feeling is one I would do just about anything to be able to create and share with you, it is so good.
I knew I had to find a way to honor this experience, so I could remember and carry it forward with me. I know that a lifetime of hating myself is a hard habit to break, and a ritual to celebrate the triumphant loss of my deepest wound was in order. That is where I decided to get my knuckles tattooed at long last. “Love is a wealth of pain” didn’t fit, so STAR KIND it was.
Now, every movement of my hands leads with these words, reminding me that I love myself, and that in order to have my self be loved, I have to speak my needs. And I love the left hand saying just KIND, and to carry that message into the world every day. To be kind, to not hastily judge a beautiful woman with a grand heart, and to be thankful that not every person in the world is a great fit for digging potatoes, some are here to heal your deepest wounds.
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Here is a video of me storytelling this chapter at Byron Stamp’s wonderful event, Truth in Comedy, in March of 2023.
