The Cult [Chuck Palahniuk]

jessiebarber:

This is an excerpt for my least favorite Chuck Palahniuk book, Lullaby. Okay, so, I really don’t even like this book at all, but I have the line “bury yourself in details” tattooed on my left forearm next to a crow skeleton (see below).

I get more questions about this tattoo than any of my others, and people always want me to explain it. Like I said, I don’t care for Lullaby, and the inclusion of the bird skeleton wasn’t intended to be any relation to the popular book cover. The crow skeleton is actually a page out of a science book I had when I was a kid (The Hunters, Dr. Philip Whitfield, 1978). I used to open this book and draw every animal and learn as much as I could about them. This was a time before the internet, so I actually had notebooks and sketchbooks in which I used to write tidbits about animals (interesting facts or where they lived in the world) and draw pictures of them. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up.

Anyway, I got this tattoo in the summer of 2008. I had just been dumped by someone that I thought I was going to marry (it seems silly now, right?), and was then diagnosed with menometrorrhagia. I was working at Apple at the time. I used to work from 7a-4p every day and then sleep from 5p-6a. Whatever the hell was going on with my body was effecting every part of my life, including my job. Thanks to the amount of time I had to take off of work, I was eventually terminated from Apple (which was my life) in January 2009.

In the midst of the summer prior, when I thought I was losing my mind, this quote was the only thing I could tell myself to make myself come back to earth. Keeping this idea in my head got me through some really difficult times.

I think if my people understood why I get the tattoos that I have, they would stop saying that I’ll “regret them someday.” I’m not saying that if I didn’t have it, I would be in a mental institution, but it has surely done its fair share of reminding me that things always get better.