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When my youngest daughter was about six months old, I started wanting a tattoo. At the time I think it was probably stemming from a minor identity crisis, but the hunger for it lasted five years. Five years I spent looking for ideas, comparing fonts, creating a folder in my phone for all the photos of tattoos I liked. The nudge I needed to make the appointment came when I asked my husband's thoughts on a design and he said “you’re never really getting a tattoo.”

The news coming out of Minneapolis has weighed heavily on me, particularly the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both of them thirty-seven years old. I wanted to go to a protest after Renee Good’s death, because that was absolutely the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, but I was scared. I’m ashamed of it, but I was. 

I’ve written before about how my mental health tanked after I gave birth to my babies. The constant fear and worry about them—the bone-deep terror of something happening to them—combined with extreme sleep deprivation was not a glowing cocktail for me. But what it's taken me years (eight and a half, to be precise) to realize is that anxiety can also be reframed as a gift.