Good Day Sunshine

on tattoos and heartbreak and healing

I had my post-divorce tattoo all planned out. A traditional crying heart with the words “woke up new” - a reference to a Mountain Goats song about a divorce - underneath the heart. I was commemorating my heartbreak, my despair, my sadness. I was getting it on my arm, between the hydrangeas and my dog. I had the date booked. And then Omicron happened and I got nervous about going into a small tattoo parlor and sitting up close with my tattoo guy, who just had a baby. So we postponed. During that time I had the chance to really think about my tattoo. Did I really want to have an ode to my divorce inked into my arm for the rest of my life? Did I want to keep looking at my arm and thinking about having my life torn apart, my heart hammered into pieces? What purpose would that serve?

I have nine tattoos. They more or less have some meaning, even if that meaning is I really liked Archie comics and Snoopy when I was young. There’s nothing really deep going on. I don’t need to have a story to go with my tattoos, I just like getting them. Except I felt somehow compelled to etch my divorce onto my body. Permanent sadness. The more I thought about it, the more absurd the idea seemed to me. I’ve taken enough psychic damage from my marriage breakup, I certainly don’t need to be reminded of it forever and ever amen. I nixed the idea of the crying heart. Turns out commemorating a negative life change is a dumb idea.

Still, I wanted to fill that space on my arm and it occurred to me that while getting a tattoo that speaks to your pessimism is a bad idea, a tattoo that speaks of optimism would be perfect. Something sunny, something hopeful and positive, something that says my life is going to go on and my heart is healing and I just want to hope for the best. So I’ve decided to get a childlike drawing of the sun (above) with the words GOOD DAY SUNSHINE around it. It’s warm and happy, it implies optimism, it’s fun and it’s one of my favorite Beatles songs. All good things.

I haven’t been much for optimism lately but I feel myself coming around. The fact that I allowed my brain to talk me out of a tattoo I was really into and get something more positive is a big turning point. Before, I was content to wallow; now I’m actively looking to break out of bad, sad moods, to find joy in little things, to make myself feel good about things. Before, there were storm clouds in my head and a heaviness in my heart; now I’m feeling on smooth ground again, like the sky has gone back to my favorite shade of blue, like I exhaled the bitterness out of my body. I feel like me again, and sometimes I feel more like me than I have in about two years. I’m settling back into my body after being away for a while. I’m settling back into my heart, too, thinking about what it would feel like to fall in love again, allowing myself to even entertain the thought.

When I first thought of the crying heart tattoo, I was deep in it. No one should make decisions when they are deep in it. That’s how you end up with a $2000 exercise bike that you never use. That’s how you end up with unforgiving tattoos. I was so hell bent on getting the negativity from the inside to the outside - transferring those divorce sentiments from my heart to my arm - that I never thought of the connotations that would stay with me forever. A crying heart, words speaking of the Mountain Goats song that goes like this:

On the morning when I woke up without you for the first time
I felt free and I felt lonely and I felt scared
And I began to talk to myself almost immediately
Not being used to being the only person there

The first time I made coffee for just myself, I made too much of it
But I drank it all just 'cause you hate it, when I let things go to waste
And I wandered through the house like a little boy, lost at the mall
And an astronaut could've seen the hunger in my eyes from space

And I sang, "Oh, what do I do?"
"What do I do?"
"What do I do?"
"What do I do without you?"

The song is beautiful and heart wrenching and I listened to it over and over in the early days of my separation, and again after the divorce was final. It leaves me with almost a sick feeling in my stomach, as if everything I’ve been through in the past year is churning around, wanting to get out of my body. To memorialize all that would be to do a great disservice to myself and my psyche. I need to heal, not punish myself.

Good day sunshine. It just feels right. It feels almost magical to say those words and have them make me excited to just be. To be alive, to be whole, to be thinking about the future. That’s a sentiment I will gladly have inked on me. Time to call my guy.