Garden of Love
/Trigger Warning/
Self-harm can be defined as the act of trying to get rid of an unbearable mood by causing physical harm that damages the body.
I used to slice my wrists, causing cuts and scars. I used to isolate myself, this is not physical harm that damages the body but it was an emotional harm that damaged my mind. I thought that I wasn’t loved. I thought I was going to struggle with this alone for my entire life. No one cared or even wanted me to be a part of their group.
I thought that I was all I was ever gonna have.
I have lived my entire life with a full textbook of different mental health disorders, affecting me every day through my interactions with other people and my time alone. This is probably the most difficult thing I will ever deal with. Depression, anxiety, paranoia, PTSD, eating disorders, and voices that live in my head; it’s a struggle that I don’t think will ever fully go away.
It doesn’t matter how many pills I take, how many therapy appointments I go to, or in a darker situation — how much I hurt myself to force these problems away.
Then, one day, my grama was talking to me in my bedroom while I was doing homework on the floor, huddled up in a black hoodie and some sweats bent over the laptop screen. She’s always been talkative. She told me about this tattoo she had always wanted, the only tattoo she had ever wanted.
She explained this tattoo to me as a simple rose, curving across her left breast. Roses are her favorite flower and she just thought it would be so sexy to have a rose cupping her tit. This made me smile.
I had just gotten my second tattoo while still being only 18-years-old. No one else but my 25-year-old cousin has tattoos in the family and no one ever seemed interested in tattoos. Where for me, tattoos were a way I could express myself and as morbid as it may seem; it was a way to feel when I felt nothing.
I never expected my grama to want a tattoo, let alone one on her chest.
I don’t know if it was her talking to me about the tattoo, or what it was exactly, but after that story, I started to open up to my grandmother a lot more. I told her about the voices in my head, about the feelings I had felt, and about every scar and why I thought it was a good idea to self-harm.
Since I started opening up to her, I started to feel something I haven’t felt in a while.
Like someone else cared for me. Like I was wanted. I was loved.
Seven months after I was 18, four months after the talk about my grandmothers rose tattoo, I got my third tattoo. A decent sized rose on my chest, for my grama. I got this tattoo for two reasons.
- She always wanted one herself
- I put it right over my heart because she was the reason I started to feel love again.

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Since then, I have added seven more tattoos onto my arm, connecting to my rose on my chest. Seven more reasons I am loved and happy, seven more reasons why I am clean from self-harm, and seven more reasons I am happy to be alive today.
I have added a daisy, with a stem that spells out never say goodbye. This is for my teacher who passed away during my senior year of high school, Scarlett LaVite. I worked in the last school play she ever directed, Peter Pan.
In Peter Pan, Peter tells Wendy to never say goodbye, because Peter knows they’ll see each other again.
I say never say goodbye because I don’t think I could handle saying goodbye to the person who really helped me figure out what I want to do with my life. I chose a daisy specifically for LaVite because after the last play we put on in this production, she gave me a bouquet of daisies as a thank you for my hard work. Once she passed away, two weeks later, I put a bouquet of daisies outside her classroom.
I got this tattoo on the two-year anniversary of her death.

I have an eagle on the back of my arm. This eagle represents my papa, he doesn’t have a favorite flower or anything but he is SUPER into eagles. I have the eagle perched on a branch, looking lean and strong, just like how I see my papa. Someone who is strong and brave and takes no shit. I chose the placement for this eagle to be always looking behind me because I know my papa always has my back, he always is watching out for me from behind, making sure I am okay and safe.

My most recent is a heart, with a pinky promise inside the heart with some weeds surrounding. Weeds because they can be beautiful even though they are usually trampled over and disregarded, like how I would feel.
This tattoo is for my best friend, Owen. During those times when I felt abandoned and pushed down — he was there, making sure I was mentally and physically always okay and helping clean me up when I relapsed again.
I didn’t realize that this was love until after I started to feel what love was like with my grama.
Once I realized that he truly did care for me, I decided to pinky promise him that I would actually try to get better. I’ll take my medicine, I’ll eat, I’ll try to stay clean from self-harm.

I made that promise about two years ago. It’s been hard to keep it and I do come close to breaking it, but I just look down at my arm, I see the tattoos and get reminded of all the people and things that love me and care for me and want me to keep pushing. I look at the details, I remember each memory, I think of each person and why they love me.
And it is all because I know I will always have my garden of love to look down on and remember…
Remember what it feels like to be wanted. To be cared for. To be LOVED.

