Casually, together, we are erecting, against and against the steamroller of standardization, a small series of words that are as dense as they are unique to tell a multitude of body stories. As if to open the season of our first scorching days, as we take off layers before walking our bodies on the sidewalks of our cities, there was this small surge of responses to my call for stories last week.
I was just inviting you to tell me your stories of the tyrannies of the body, your struggles and your lack of love for what serves you both as a vehicle and as an interface. I tell you right away since I have not succeeded, to date, in reading you all. What you put in my email inbox requires time and delicacy, both for reading and for responding. I am therefore in the process of freeing it up, this time, which I need to fashion the setting necessary to welcome this precious word that you have launched at me.
I like the idea, not to say madness, of writing each time an answer which does not mime having read, but which has really read, far from the voicemails which assure us that our call is important, against a background alienating music. I still cherish the idea of real correspondence, of these round trips from you to me, of all these messages that begin with Chère Lise, Alain, Alexis, Mia or Camille. I don’t always succeed and I regret it just as sincerely. I am completely ravaged by my romanticism, but I value my ravages, since they often keep me far from the surrounding cynicism and, somewhere, alive enough to face reality.
So you have written to me a great deal about what decades of self-hatred had left painful and deep furrows in your minds, about what hunger had dug in your days and about what the world had sent you back to the place he reserved for you, depending on your appearance. You can still do it, until the end of the month, I will collect your stories on this theme which is so vast, which many industries have unfortunately grasped.
In reading you, I looked for the light, the light that you have sometimes, fortunately, found, but also, other times, of the light that dwells in the details, in those seemingly light things, but which, when lingers there, also reveal universes of significance. I then thought of all those drawings that we choose to ink on our skin, to make it pretty, to tell a story, to hide pain or to find a remnant of ritual in a society that seems to have stripped of all its rites. Because we sometimes cherish it beyond what we blame it for, we sometimes take this time to inscribe forever, on a piece of this body, a part of our relationship to the world, which we also choose to present to others. .
I therefore tell you, if you don’t mind, the story of the whale that inhabits my whole forearm, in the avowed expectation that the momentum will come to you in return to do the same, that we can place, alongside stories of pain, stories of sweetness.
We were driving to Georgian Bay as a family. Up front, thoughtful in the passenger seat, I had this sudden and unexpected desire to totemize a whale on my skin. A flash, an impulse, a passing fad? I would rather dare to speak of an “intuition”, now, to designate the one that had imposed itself on my mind like a revelation, like something that I was learning, and that I didn’t really choose. And like every time things that are supposed to happen to us seem to want to happen to us, the rest was disarmingly simple: I had found, as soon as I got back from vacation, the tattoo artist, the drawing, the date, and the trick was cheek. Two weeks later, I tamed my whale, huge on my forearm, loving it as one loves a form of alterity new in oneself, which one knows one must make one’s own, even if it has something foreign thing again.
Many years later, one night, a strange dream came to me. For the psychologist that I am, nothing about this dream had seemed trivial to me. Installed near a pool of seawater, I had to choose the whale in which I was going to spend nine months. First seduced by a majestic orca, I was about to stop my choice on the black and white mastodon when, suddenly, I remembered the English word to designate it: killer whale. “He’s going to kill me, he has teeth! No ! I have to find my blue whale. So I patiently waited for my whale to arrive before diving into its large mouth. The dream ended with this image of a whale stranded on the beach, with me still trapped inside, having to wait for it to completely decompose before coming out again and moving on with my life.
Without making any causal connection, by daring to stand alongside the rationalist discourse of my time, I dare to say here with you that, a few months after this dream, I was diagnosed with cancer, and that, throughout the nine months how long the treatments would last, I would carry with me an intuition, tattooed on my forearm, that I would not die, no, that I was only, like a Jonas or a Pinocchio, on a journey to the heart of my whale, on a train to learn not to lie to myself anymore, and that it would take time, yes, before coming out into the open and revealing myself as I am.
Here is my little whale story.
And you, what are your tattoo stories?
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.