I’ve five tats now, and love all but one: a silly fairy-type thing under my left clavicle. But even that little monstrosity serves a purpose: never drink and tattoo, and never have ink punched into your body just for the sake of having ink punched into your body. I added my fifth recently: across the bow of my left foot, Life Is Beautiful, arced above the initials of the beautiful man who taught me that lesson, PCS.

I’d been thinking about what my next inkstory would be, and after a 9-day stint in the locked psych ward where I’d committed myself, I was coming to again appreciate my life, in all its painful half-glory, and my sobriety. And so one beautiful afternoon, after I left my intensive outpatient therapy program (IOP) for the day, it occurred to me that those were the words, and he was the person, that I wanted forever on my body. It may have looked impetuous but it wasn’t; my life was changing in many ways, some kind and some painful beyond measure. The IOP is a dialectical behavioral therapeutic approach to recovering from/living with severe depression and/or bipolar disease. As a 50-year-0ld woman who has lived with depression for 35 years, I was (and am) learning to approach life in an entirely different way. One that teaches me to live in the moment; to stop dwelling on the past (while still honoring and recognizing my life experiences) and fretting about he unknown future. This is a sea change for me. I’ve been a control freak since I was a little girl and my home life was out of control.

Some children fear the boogie man but mine was quite real, taking the form of men I knew who violated my body and crushed my soul and heart a bit. I so wanted to stop being touched that I took to eating, ballooning my body to ensure that I was no longer “such a beautiful little girl.” Instead, I became the angry little fat child, much like the anti-heroine in (ironically) Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. Not being beautiful, in my child’s mind, was the only way to protect myself. It worked. No one touched me anymore. Of course, that could have been because I was getting older, but in my mind I had found the solution to keeping men at bey: undesirability.

It’s worth noting that I kept that wall of fat around my body until I was in my forties, in the seventh year of my second marriage and my daughter’s life. I had decided that I no longer wanted to “live” as a bystander, and that my enormous girth was holding me back in all of my life, as a mother, a journalist, a woman. And so I took control, eventually shedding more than 200 pounds. But that’s a story for another day.

Back to the tattoos.

I searched for the perfect typeface and found it: a combination reminiscent of Edward Gorey, and the beauty of Art Deco. The young woman at my favorite tattoo shop (yes, I have a favorite), Joelle, was kind and creative and willing. Life Is Beautiful PCS was inked into my skin in about an hour and I was showing it to my daughter 30 minutes after that.

I relapsed the next night.

I looked at that beautiful tattoo, my left leg crossed over my right, and drank. And drank some more. I drank Til I blacked out but that isn’t unusual for me. I woke the next morning sick. Sick to my stomach from the wine, sick inside because I’d blown 30 days of sobriety, sick because I knew I’d very likely fucked it all up with PCS. Sick of myself. Sick with the knowledge — the absolute, undeniable certainty — that I was, in fact, I am, in fact, an alcoholic.

But still. Life Is Beautiful. It says so right there on my body. A reminder, not a mockery.

PCS was hurt and confused and I am still working to repair that damage to his trust in me. I am still working to fix myself and my old need to drink because, unlike antidepressants, which only work to level my organic serotonin levels, alcohol took me out of my body and mind and shuttered my racing thoughts. Well, probably not, but I was certainly unaware of them during those nightly blackouts. And so I love this tattoo. Life Is Beautiful, even when it’s not. PCS is beautiful. Always. And those words, his philosophy, his approach, touched me and changed me in a way no therapy, no medication, no drink, no love, ever has. And I can live with that on my body until I perish.