I love tattoos. That’s not a secret. I’ve been saying that I wanted (a) tattoo(s) eversince I was around the age of 12. I waited for quite some years, but in 2009 I finally went to a tattooist and got my first 2 tattoos. One on each wrist. Now, 3 years later, I have 7 tattoos and I know myself well enough to know that there will be a few more to follow.
However, I don’t get tattoos just because I like them or anything, to me each tattoo I get has a special meaning. One could say there’s a story behind them all.
Also I do not get a tattoo unless I’ve had a specific idea for a specific place on my body in mind for at least half a year. No spontaneous “hey, I want that, lets get it this week!” tattoos for me, as I very well realise that I will be ‘stuck’ which my tattoos for life, so I want them all to be thought through properly.

So, here are my tattoos (in chronological order) and what they stand for/mean to me.

~June 2009~
# on the left (my right wrist): the capricorn sign, as this was my mother’s starsign.
# on the right (my left wrist): the sagittarius sign, as this is both my stepmother’s & my starsign.

~November 2009~
# on the right side of my stomach: the G-clef. Music has always been a big part of my life, eventhough I’m not a musician myself, music helps me get to my emotions and for whichever mood I’m in, or whatever experience/life-event I’m thinking about, there’s always a song somewhere that I can relate to.

~November 2010~
# on my left side: a ‘black’ rose. I got this one just over a year after a dear friend of mine, whom I met online, committed suicide. Her nickname on the internet was “black_rose_13″, hence the black rose. Apart from this being a remembrance of her and how much she has done for me, it is also a reminder of a very dark period of my life, and how, despite losing people I love, in the end I came out stronger. It’s a bit of a “hey, you were in a really dark place, but you came out stronger than before. So, no matter how bad things get, you are strong and you will only grow from it” message to myself.

~January 2012~
# on my right side: “Where words fail, music speaks.” I felt the G-clef was a bit ‘simple’ all on its own and it didn’t do justice to the meaning it had for me. So I had this sentence added which says it all, really.

~February 2012~
# on my right calf: a rock in flames, with wings. This has to do with my father and my stepmother. The rock in flames portrays the Dutch saying “rots in de branding” which in a way is what my dad has been. A strong man, regardless of the difficult circumstances our family had to face when I was a baby. At the same time the rock portrays my dad, my sister and me as a family, and the fire is kind of suffocating us. But then there are the (angel’s) wings, portraying my stepmother, that carry the rock, us, out of the fire into safety.

~April 2012~
On the left foot of both my best friend Chrissy and myself: a mystic knot with an M in the centre. I’ve known Chrissy for years and nobody knows me the way she does, and this applies the other way around as well. We’ve both had struggles in our life and we just ‘get’ each other. We’ve seen each other at our best as well as our worst. Also, both our mother’s have passed away when we were still young, and they both carried a name starting with the letter M. So obviously the M stands for our mother. The knot (skr. Sjrivasta) stands for eternity, which is pretty much how Chrissy and I feel about our bond. No matter what happens, we’ve been through so much and are so similar that we will be connected for eternity, whether we are physically near each other or not.

That’s all 7 my tattoos, for now. I’m playing with some more ideas, 2 actually, for my back that I might get around the end of this year, or maybe somewhere spring next year, not sure yet.

So, as you may have noticed, I’ve managed to recover some old posts from before the big sweep. Unfortunately the posts I could recover only go back to halfway through 2011, so many posts are losts.
However, I also write down most of my poems the old fashioned way, with a pen on paper, you know   And so I might be typing some of them up here again sometime soon.

And as for the ‘mindblurbs’ that got lost… well they weren’t that interesting anyway :p

G’day y’all.

Some of you might have noticed, the site’s been offline for a bit and this is not the site the way it was.

Unfortunately for some reason everything was deleted (I probably hit a wrong button).
Thankfully I do have a backup, but I’m not super computer geeky and all, so I’m still working on getting the site back up as it was. Please be patient with me, as hopefully in a little while everything should be back to the way it was!

Thanks.
Ish.

First let me explain what exactly TWLOHA is. TWLOHA is the abbreviation of the non-profit organisation/movement ‘To Write Love On Her Arms’.
In general people don’t like to read a whole story to find out what an organisation is about, so to explain what TWLOHA stands for and is about I’ll just copy paste their ‘mission statement’:

To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide.  TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery.

Now of course that doesn’t cut it completely. It’s also there to support and inform people in the (direct) environment of those struggling. A few words that (for me) connect with TWLOHA are:
hope, strength, information, help, possibilities.

If you’d like to know more about how TWLOHA came to life and what they do exactly I would like to refer you to their website, which you can find here .
As you can see in the banner at the top of this post, they also have a Myspace. Apart from that they can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.

Something I like very much about the way they provide hope and awareness is that they use music and artists. Music is something many people can relate to and like. I think it’s one of the most widely appreciated forms of art that actually reaches just about everyone.
I love how artists like Forever The Sickest Kids, Anberlin, Jimmy Eat World, but also the even more internationally known Plain White T’s, Christina Perri, OneRepublic, and Paramore show their support for TWLOHA either through social media or by wearing some of the TWLOHA merchandise.
(I love their merch, actually have some of their shirts and longsleeves myself).

Enough general information for now. If you want to know more check the links I provided in the above.
Now let’s talk about why this organisation is so important to me personally.

When I was young my mother passed away. Obviously that is something big and traumatic to happen to anyone, especially a young child, and it has left its marks on our family and myself. My dad met a wonderful woman though, about 4 years after my mother’s death.
Then there were some more things that happened in my childhood and teen years that made things more of a struggle for me. I guess I could say I’ve had a hard time throughout my life so far. This translated into my behaviour towards friends and even more so family. I could only see the flaws in my dad and his wife, not realising they raised me by the best of their abilities. Not realising I wasn’t exactly an easy teen to be raising- far from easy actually.
After I moved out to attend University half way across the country our relationship got really bad to the point of having no contact at all. This all happened around the same time I got really depressed. Looking back at it, I’d had ‘dark’ feelings for most of my teen years, and I reckon they played a big part in how I pushed my family’s limits and eventually ended up pushing them, and everyone else for that matter, away. Once I had pushed everyone away, and lived in a completely new environment the feelings just came out. I got depressed to the point where I dropped out of university and just didn’t care about anything anymore. Thoughts of suicide crossed my mind regularly.

At that point there were 3 things keeping me going: my best friend, my cat, and To Write Love On Her Arms.

A person, a pet and an organistion. Sounds silly, but that really is what made me want to keep going. I saw how much I was hurting my best friend, but she didn’t go anywhere, she sticked by my side. My cat never left either. The unconditional love from those two and the hope that was provided by TWLOHA, the message that things really could get better was just what I needed at that point in my life.
Eventually I ended up getting professional help in a therapy group. I would go to the mental health center 4 days a week and in a group we’d spend those days doing creative therapy, drama therapy, psychomotor therapy, we’d get evaluated by a group of therapists, we had group conversations, etc. Aside from that I also met with a therapist individually once every 2 weeks and when I was doing worse it’d be weekly. This all was quite intense and heavy and I stayed in the group for a year. It was hard work and I faced most of my issues during that time. It definitely wasn’t an easy road but it was all well worth it in the end. Because I came out stronger and another very important thing; they pushed me to get back in touch with my family, especially my parents.
They guided us in how to approach one another and they helped us to set different expectations to one another. Which, I guess, was the key needed for us to ever be in a loving relationship with each other again.

This all happened throughout 2007-2008, and it’s been a rocky road, some bumps more difficult to overcome than others, but we got there and I’m now proud to say that I’m in a more loving and harmonic relationship with my parents than I’ve ever been.

Throughout all these years TWLOHA was there, providing hope that things would get better. And reading stories about other people who (had) struggled but were still there, getting better each day.. it made me realise that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

In the end it was the combination of having a support system around me (my best friend, my cat and eventually therapy as well) AND an organisation like TWLOHA, providing hope for the future, making me feel like things really would get better eventually that got me better.

I’m not saying life is all peachy now, there is the regular bump in the road and I have my moments of feeling down in the dumps. But you know what, life can’t be all roses and that’s fine. Because I think that if life was perfect, we wouldn’t appreciate the good things for their true worth.

Looking back at my struggles and the way my life has been so far, I’m glad I’ve struggled the way I did, because it has made me value love, friendship, family and all the small happy things in life so much more. I can honestly say that, in general, I have taken the bad things in my life and turned them around into something good.
I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I’d had a different childhood and different teen years. And I would like to think that I’m a good person

So I’m forever grateful that TWLOHA exists. I know it has helped and will continue to help so many other people like it helped me. Thank you, Jamie Tworkowski and everyone who’s helped making TWLOHA what it is today.

Sincerely,
Ester.

Having 4 tattoos myself, with more to be added, I obviously am slightly biased in regards to this subject, but I wanted to raise it nevertheless.

Different people have different ideas on whether tattoos are okay, art even, or bad, maybe even a form of mutilation. I myself have 4 tattoos at the moment, and I will get another 2 in January, so obviously I like tattoos. But I can see where people who are against tattoos are coming from.
I think even most ‘tattoo-haters’ would have to agree that tattooing is a form of art. Even my dad, who does NOT like tattoos in general, said to me (when he saw the rose on my side): “it’s a beautiful picture..” (“just a shame that it’s a tattoo and not a drawing or painting” is probably what he was thinking at the end of that sentence).

To me, the beauty of a tattoo lies not so much in the tattoo itself, eventhough there are gorgeous works of art out there, but more in the story behind it.. Which is part of why I always go to Giovanni Malaihollo, aka Tattoo G, for my tattoos. Apart from the fact that he’s a brilliant artist and incredibly creative, he also asks for the reason for getting your tattoo and the story behind it. And if you give him some freedom in creating a tattoo; if you give him the story and the idea behind the tattoo and what it stands for, he comes up with something amazing for sure.

My tattoos all stand for something which has had an impact on my life, or a significant meaning to me.
On my wrists I have 2 starsigns. On my left the capricorn sign and on the right the saggitarius sign. These stand for my mother and myself, and for our everlasting bond, eventhough she’s passed away years ago.
On my stomach, towards the right I have a G-clef. This represents my love for music and how music helps me get to my emotions. This tattoo will soon be extended to a bigger one, as the sentence “Where words fail, music speaks” will be added to it and it’ll be made into one nice piece.
On my left side, there’s a black rose. It’s not pitch black, but more like shadow-y black, and this one is particularly special to me, as it stands for several things. It’s a bit of a tribute to someone who’s done a lot more than I could explain for me, but unfortunately passed away just over 3 years ago (she was also known as black_rose_13 on the internet). On the other hand it also stands for a very dark period in my life and is a reminder of how bad things can get and how bad things used to be for me, with seemingly no end to the tunnel of darkness, and how strong I came out of it, how it has changed me as a person and how it’s made me appreciate the small things in life so much more now.

So those are the stories behind my tattoos, I also explained how one of the tattoos I’m getting in January is an extension to an already existing one. The second one I will not say anything about just yet, apart from it meaning a lot to me and hopefully also to 2 other people…

That’s it as far as the stories behind my tattoos go. Now let’s talk about the whole idea of tattoos being a form of mutilation. Technically, it can be seen as a form of mutilation as mutilation is the “(permanent) damaging of something” and, if we’re being nitpickers I guess one could argue that you’re damaging your skin when getting a tattoo.
Also, being a bit of a masochist myself, I love the actual feeling of the tattoo being ‘engraved’ onto your skin. A feeling most would describe as “very painful”.
And I guess that feeling is part of why tattoos are so addictive. I can see some of you readers laugh right now, thinking ‘that’s ridiculous’, but I’m telling you, it IS addictive. 99.9% of the people with tattoos I know only want more and more tattoos as they’re getting them. I went in for those 2 tats on my wrists and that’s it. Now I’ve got 4 and another 2 will be added in January and I have another one (or maybe more) idea(s) for future tattoos.

Maybe tattoos are both art and mutilation. Although mutilation really is a strong word. I guess masochistic is a better fit.
The actual engraving of the tattoo onto one’s skin could be seen as masochistic, and the tattoo itself is a piece of art. (At least when done by a proper, artistic tattooist of course)

Funny, how just as I opened this page to start writing this, a Christina Aguilera song starts playing in my iTunes list, going like this: “I’m leaving today, I’m living it, I’m leaving it, to change”.

I guess that does kind of describe my move away from here. I moved to Dennenburg in the summer of 2006, at the age of 18. I’d always lived in the same street, grew up in a consistent environment. And though I’ve been through plenty of things back where I grew up, both pleasant and unpleasant, it felt safe there and it was a huge step for me to move away. Especially so far away, leaving everything and everyone behind. Starting over.

Things didn’t work out the way I had in mind, but within these years (can’t believe it’s  been almost 5 years already!) I’ve gained so much life-experience, knowledge in regards to socializing and perhaps most importantly; I came to know myself.
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have grown as much, emotionally, as I have if it hadn’t been for this place and the people that have been around here (and still are).

My time here in Dennenburg has been one hell of a rollercoaster with loads of extremes, both up and down. Living in a house that at times had a bit too much drama going on, not just between people but also in people’s lives. God knows there have been quite a few hasty trips to the hospital, with an overnight stay to top it all. And then there are all the (nightly) swims in the river, regardless of the time of year. Whether it was July or February, noon or 3am; whenever we got the idea in our heads to go to the river, we’d go and jump in the river.
Perhaps most famous of everything are the topless runs through the village.

Looking at photos taken throughout my time here, watching the videos we took, I do have to admit that it is not without sadness that I’m leaving this place for Nijmegen. So many memories were made here. And eventhough I know the memories will always be there in my mind.. actually leaving the place that brought all these memories does fall hard on me.

But like I said at the beginning of this post: “I’m leaving today, I’m living it, leaving it, to change”. I have to have a change of environment. I notice that (especially the last months) I’ve been too absorbed in the memories I’ve made here, the things I went through. I’m too distracted to properly focus on my education.

This place has been where I’ve had the time of my life (summer 2007), yet at the same time, I’ve had the worst time of my life. I need to move away, move on. It’s time for a change. Time for a future.