Tats

I might have lost my mind or something, but I decided to do something kind of crazy last week...

I debated for a long time on whether or not this was really something that I wanted to do. After all, it's going to be on my back for forever, so I didn't want to do something that I was going to regret in 10 or 15 years.
My tattoo went through a lot of revisions before I decided on what I got. I thought of batsignals, mermaids, tramp stamps... you name it. I talked to a good friend on mine, and he encouraged me to look at getting something that has a very deep meaning to me. Possibly something representing a struggle that I'd overcome. That was when the idea for this struck me like a bolt of lightening.
The words 'not all who wander are lost' have a couple of different meanings to me. The very high level meaning for me being that it's a quote from Lord of the Rings, which is something that my family is all large fans of, and it ties me back to them.
The second meaning is a lot deeper. Last year I went through a very hard divorce. I had been the bread winner in my little family for 3 years, and most of the things that we owned had come from the hard work that I had done in my very short life. After I decided that we were getting divorced, his family packed up his belongings and left me with essentially nothing. I think that they know that everything that was taken wasn't his, and he didn't have a right to most of it, but nevertheless, it's still gone.
I came back to an apartment that had almost nothing. My bedroom was completely empty, except for where some of my clothes had been thrown on the floor. I still had my dining table, but only because it belonged to my cousin, and I also had my couches, because they belonged to my parents. I didn't even have a way to heat up food in my house for a long time. It's incredibly hard to come back to a place that you call "home" and to hear your voice echo off the empty walls in the empty rooms.
I sat for a long time and cried. I vowed to myself that I would never ever in my life find myself in such a helpless situation. No one would ever be able to rip every piece of my life away. I would always have something from now on, and I would die trying to get it.
At that point in my life I felt completely alone. I was lost in this whirlwind that was adulthood, and I had nothing to grab on to. Even religion was lost to me, I felt like an outcast among strangers that could get everything right. I didn't know what was going to happen to me.
Slowly but surely I've been able to piece my life back together. The final meaning in this tattoo is the birds flying away from the dandelion. I came into my marriage like one of the seeds from the dandelion, completely helpless to whatever it was that the wind wanted me to do. But over time I found my wings, and I could direct my own fate.
I don't ever want to forget that I was strong enough to dig myself out of a hole that I never expected to find myself in. There are still times when the emotions from that time hurt me to my core, and now I have a reminder that I can make it out of that dark place again, just like I did the first time. :)