Chris Dodds

I started my back piece over a year ago, a mosaic of mandalas, necker cubes, and pseudo-sacred geometry in black and grey. Since then, I’ve gone to my artist every month to get stabbed for 3.5-4.5 hours at a time - around 50 hours under the needle so far. I’ve got another 10 hours or so to go.

I’m ready for it to be over, I think.

This isn’t my first tattoo. I have five others, all decent size. None of them have affected me like this one though. I’m not proud of any of them like I am of this one.

Everything before this was done in one or two sessions. They didn’t cost anything other than money. This one has at times drained me and filled me up.

The needle stings until about the 30 minute mark. At that point the body is flooded with adrenaline and endorphins. Some of the edge goes away. You settle in to the rhythm of the process. There have been sessions where I’ve almost dozed off.

When the endorphins start to wear off, the pain comes back hard. My wall is usually at about 4 hours. It takes a lot of focused breathing to get much past that.

There have been a few sessions where the drugs my body makes weren’t powerful enough to help much at all. Over the ribs, the kidneys. My lower back in general is surprisingly sensitive. At times the needle felt more like a scalpel. Those sessions were hours of misery.

But it was worth it. It’s one thing to endure pain you can’t walk away from. Kidney stones, broken bones, trauma. Those teach survival. You gain something else from selective pain: discipline, a more concrete sense of where your limits are when you could walk away, how much control you have - your agency.

I don’t enjoy pain, but I feel like I learn a lot about myself from it, and I recognize the weird privilege I have to be able to opt in. I’ve learned that I am way tougher than I give myself credit for and can push myself deep into discomfort and choose to sit with it peacefully for a long time.

This is also the first tattoo I’ve got since learning that I am autistic and finally understanding how deep touch affects me, how grounding it is, even though light touch can drive me bonkers. I’ve become more comfortable with how I’m wired going through the process, more forgiving of how I’m affected by the world I live in. I give myself more grace. It sounds so stupid to my ear, but it’s real that someone can hurt you and heal you at the same time.

I don’t know that we’re friends, but the artist and I have a relationship at this point. It’s hard not to when you spend that much time with someone else. It’s strangely intimate. We share the same birthday, a year apart. We know each other’s kids’ names, ages, personalities. She’s tattooed my wife.

It’s always funny when people ask me what one of my tattoos means. For me, they don’t mean anything. They’re just the physical mark that’s left at the end of the process. Something to help you remember being tattooed.

I said I thought I was ready for this to be over and that’s true. I think I’ve learned about all I’m going to learn from this piece.

Which means I’m already planning another.

I started writing again this year - really writing, for the first time in decades.

So far I’ve written a novella, a couple of creative nonfiction pieces, and a handful of flash fiction pieces. Learning more about traditional publishing has been a journey.

I’m coming at it with more strategy than a younger me would have: doing research before I submit, being laser focused on editorial fit, targeting a mix of realistic and long-shot outlets to hedge. I’ve got spreadsheets and dashboards to track things. It’s very nerdy.

The robot has been moderately useful here - surfacing presses and magazines I wouldn’t have found, but it’s terrible at gauging fit and quality. When you do find somewhere that looks like a good fit, you often discover that submissions are closed until next year, or they’re actually out of business, or you were wrong and they are, in fact, a terrible fit.

A few things I’ve learned:

• Agents generally don’t care about novellas, but there are presses that publish novellas and only accept submissions via agent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• The Big 5 also don’t care about novellas and I get it. Paying $17 for a paperback copy of We the Animals is a tough pill to swallow considering how thin it looks on the shelf.
• Chapbooks exist, but no one cares about them except the people who write them.
• Contests are weirdly legit compared to other industries (with caveats).
• Flash is a dopamine trap: fast feedback, likely publication, low traction. It’s good for practicing compression though.
• Modern literary fiction (which I’ve been reading more of) seems to be 90% navel-gazey MFA nonsense written to impress other people with MFAs. Clever for the sake of clever is not a quality I envy.
• Tools like Duotrope are kind of neat.

There’s a lot of domain knowledge to absorb which I mostly enjoy. And I’m getting better as a writer and pushing myself along the way.

I just started submitting things in July and haven’t had any accepts yet, but have shortlisted at a couple of places, like Orion’s Belt. That at least feels nice (oooh, shiny!) and is a signal I’m on the right track.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of self this year. Much of it is the “who am I? / what is this even?” that comes with turning 40. Some other portion is trying to find solid ground when it feels like the world is upside down and on fire.

Art has played into that, in music and writing. What is my voice? What does a me-shaped thing look like? And who do I rhyme with?

I started the year unsteady, but the more work I’ve put in to uncovering who I am, the more grounded I’ve felt. I’m sure this is me channeling my inner Tony Robbins (or whoever is en vogue these days), but maybe that’s the path through the muck of now - knowing who you are, what you value, and how you want to show up in the world.

The latter is the most concrete for me. I want to be someone who:

• makes space for others to be themselves
• leads with vulnerability and gives people access to pieces they keep locked up, while managing the cost of that
• lives as an example of a man who is whole and flawed, not trapped in shame and social programming
• can keep empathy alive without shutting down in a world that feels bleak sometimes

I dunno. I’m trying.

Built a new site with Astro, deployed on GitHub Pages. I want a place to share things again that isn’t social media.

More to come.