Ink Therapy and the Ascension of Me

By: Nevaeh Rhodes

I had spent 18 torturous years loving my high school sweet heart. It was so good in the beginning but turned to a high level of toxicity shortly after high school. We had 2 boys and a boat load of issues over the years. We had this push and pull dynamic that when it was good it was so so good, but when it wasn't the destruction was devastating. We would later discover that my partner had some severe mental health concerns. He was diagnosed a narcissistic bi-polar with schizoaffective tendencies, after being admitted to a mental health facility for attempting suicide and threatening to kill me. I felt bad for him and wanted only to aid in easing his cries for help. However I didn't know anything about mental health. I turned to my own research, reading books, joining support groups and talking to his therapists. Up until this point our time together had been quite rough and he had refused help of any kind. Since he was willing to try I decided I owed him one last hurrah. I was going to put my all in for this man one last time. We spent 6 months back and fourth with therapy and group sessions. I thought we were making some progress. He started to seem happy or at least content again, and at least was at ease some of the time. That was until he came to me on a random Tuesday afternoon and announced he had met the love of his life and was moving in with her to take care of her and her 3 children by 3 different men. (That's how he worded it to me.) I was blown away. He gave no thought to me or our boys. He was just gone. He was like my kryptonite though. It was like he had this spell on me, this unbreakable hold. A few weeks later when they had assaulted each other and the relationship ended he called me to come get him, and I did. I took him back and again we were trying to regain some sort of stability and sustenance to our relationship but he was on drugs and not the ones prescribed by doctors and hell I did them occasionally as well to cope with the mental abuse and anguish he was consistently putting me through. He terrorized our whole household on a daily basis. I saw what this trauma and life style was doing to our boys and made a vow to myself i was going to get myself and my boys away from this situation once and for all...even if it killed me...which it did but I'll come back to that later. The only thing standing in my way was my fear of him and the awful things he promised to do to me every time I tried to create space between us. I had filed for a petition of safety with the courthouse of the county we lived in and was becoming more and more bold in my attempts to escape his tyrannical behavior. The cops had been called several times by myself and the neighbors but each time they came he put on his facade and became prince charming wooing their ears with exactly what they wanted to hear. He made me look like the jealous ex that couldn't move on because he had found new life and she hadn't. The last time the police came to our house I had begged and pleaded with them to help me to get away from the clutches of his debilitating grasps. They did not aid me that day. In fact they warned me if they had to return I would be the one going to jail regardless of what he had done. I was lost. Dead inside. I felt so hopeless and hollow. I was more desperate than I ever remember being. When the police left so did he. I still remember the smirk on his face as he drove off past me. He rolled the window down to taunt me saying "you will never escape or defeat me". Those words echoed into the depths of my soul. It was as if Satan himself was squeezing the stale air from my pungent lungs. I heard myself recall my vow. "Even if it kills me" I said out loud. I went back in the house and sent my boys to a friends house up the road. I told her not to let them return until I reached out. Both my neighbor and my boys where discerned by my freakishly calm demeanor, odd requests and behavior. My mind was dark. The future did not seem to be flowing in my favor. I had decided that this night was it. I wasn't doing this anymore. I surrendered to the acceptance that when he returned we would fight and that when we did I was committed to fight him for every single piece i had left of my life...even if that meant it was just this one last night. I was sated in this acceptance and knew my kids would be alright. I dropped to my knees and I screamed and I cried. I yelled to the heavens and begged to be somehow removed from the bondage this man held me captive in. I pleaded for my mind to be released from this tyrant. I remember just wanting it all to end and then I cried so hard and so loudly from deep within. I bellowed on my knees with all that I had. I awoke the next morning tucked in my bed with no memory of how I got there. The last thing I remembered was crying on the floor. I noticed that he had not returned from the previous evening. I also noticed that my mind was quiet with no worry or doubt. I had no anxiety and no fear. My boys came home when I gave the all clear. We watched movies and ate and played video games and just enjoyed the peaceful atmosphere. When my husband returned home late that evening we didn't fight he kept his distance in fact I remember feeling almost a pause present in the air. I went to bed to get some rest as I had court the next morning for a traffic ticket and needed to be rested to be there. He had even agreed to give me a ride to the courthouse. The next day the judge called my name and handled my case when I turned to leave the chief of police and I stood face to face. "Put your hands behind your back" I heard him say. Both myself and my husband were arrested that day for 5 year old warrants that were 4 states away. The cops in this town knew about these cases and knew the county we were wanted in wasn't going to extradite. Meaning they weren't going to pay to have either one of us brought over 1000 miles to their facility. Little did I know at this time fate was however hard at work. The officer that arrested us took his paid vacation from the county and went and worked the fairgrounds as security to come up with enough money to transport us to the county that had our warrants. Now we had already established that that county had no intentions of coming to get us, so by this officer showing up to the jail and taking us 1000 miles away without permission from the proper authorities he committed 2 counts of federal kidnapping and illegal transportation of inmates across state lines. A crime punishable by 10 years per count in jail. Not to mention the procedure was wrong in that he put us both in the back of the same squad car. Male and female shackled together. Now I was thinking exactly what you are. I'm gonna sue the shit out of y'all. Justice is gonna be served on this one for sure, right! Well it was. But not in the way you might think. Justice was served in a higher court. See then this thing happened to me. I would spend the next few months in jail and so would he. If you have never spent any kind of time in jail then you would have no real concept of the amount of time your alone with your thoughts, by yourself in your head, left to your own demise. I had never had this kind of time on my hands. In fact I didn't think it was normal to have as many thoughts as I was having. They were constant and about any and every subject. I would think and think and think and think and then once I had danced around every subject I could fathom they would call us out of our cells for breakfast and I'd wonder what on Earth I was going to fill my mind with for the remaining 23 hours and 14 minutes of this day. I started to notice when I thought about the things I missed and their absence it made my sorrow worse. My time was harder to do when I allowed my thoughts to be sad about things I had no control over. So I began to focus my thoughts to a better place. I thought about how the sand would feel on my toes in Puerto Rico and I thought about how nice it was that even though I was in jail I wasn't living moment to moment walking on eggshells in turmoil because of my husband. I was actually at peace. The more I thought about that and how good the absence of his control and energy felt, the more I thought "oh I like this". Then it dawned on me so clearly. I had been given exactly what I needed exactly what I had asked for. I remember feeling so safe and so loved in this epiphany. To the outside world that knew nothing of my struggle or my life I'm sure this situation seemed so bleak, but to me I had been delivered. I had been saved. I was okay and I knew I was always going to be okay. So I began to focus on my passions and what made me happy. I came up with a lot of things. Writing is a big one for me. Plenty of time for that in jail. Music is another one. Tattoos! Man I love tattoos. I missed getting tattoos. The sound of the tattoo gun. The pain of the needles that let you remember your still alive. The thought and the process that goes into deciding what your gonna get and where. I would say tattoos were a topic that kept me at peace in there. I had this friend that I started to draw on with ink pens that we would get off of commissary (the jail store). I would draw the same designs on her almost everyday unless one of us had to go to court. I drew star gazer lilies amongst the moon and stars and the words "To live would be an awfully big adventure" on one of her arms and on the other I would switch between drawing a compass with the word remember on it and a design of sheet music and other various "Zen" symbols. I told anyone who would listen or that acquired as to what I was doing that I was drawing the tattoos I was going to get when I got out. I believed that I would as though I already had them. I believed I would have them and they would symbolize for me my freedom, my growth, my beautiful children, my clarity and my heritage. 14 hours after I got out I was laying under a tattoo gun getting my ribs tattooed. The tattoo says " we're all mad here" from Alice in Wonderland and the Cheshire cat grin is done in black light ink next to the phrase so it only shows up in the presence of black light. Next I got a Viking infinity triangle with lightening going through it on the back of my neck to symbolize my Viking ancestry, protection, and to say I had weathered the storm. The same artist that had done my neck allowed me to draw and trace my quarter sleeves. This excited me because I knew essentially that the tats would be my own design in my own hand writing. This appealed to me greatly. I had only been out of jail for 6 weeks when I emerged with 4 new tats and both quarter sleeves complete. I was becoming a new person and not just the physical aspect of me but I was transforming into a person I didn't know...but that I liked. Looking back it was as if I had died. That person in that empty shell, void of hope, had died somewhere along the way and I had ascended into...well...into a version of me that made me wildly happy. I removed everything from my life that didn't bring me bliss feeling like if it wasn't making me happy then it no longer served me. My tattoos where just a glorious piece of the puzzle, but they bring me so much joy. They are constant reminders that my inner Goddess and warrior blood runs vibrantly through my veins. I feel like when you hear things like "you are the church" and "your body is a temple" your being urged to love it and care for it and make it beautiful. Some choose to do so by eating right and with exercise. Some choose to cut and color their hair, but for me I choose to be tattooed. I view my body art as the stained glass to the temple of my soul.