(tattoo gun)
- Fuck.
- [Voiceover] So we're here today 'cause we're getting tattoos.
But also, we're here right now because the specific tattoos
we're getting are about starting a conversation.
And so we're going to have that conversation.
(calm beat music)
- The semicolon metaphor is, an author chooses to use
the semicolon when they could have ended the sentence,
but choose not to.
And I also love that the whole point of getting the tattoos
is that tattoos are a great conversation piece,
so it almost is like, forces you to talk about this stuff.
- Let's get some tattoos.
- Let's get inked up.
- I'm gonna get a song lyric,
"This world can be ugly, but isn't it beautiful?"
It's basically, you know, saying,
yeah, shit can get rough in your life,
but if you take the time to actually open your eyes
and not just focus on what's terrible and see
what's beautiful around you.
I mean, it gives you a whole new perspective.
- You lost your two friends both to suicide, right?
- Yeah, I lost one in high school my junior year.
I was actually supposed to hangout with him
the day it happened, so that kind of hit really hard.
And then the other one I lost my sophomore year of college
and that kind of changed my life pretty heavily.
I mean, you don't realize how many people you effect
until that happens and it really opens your eyes
and you see that you impact people you barely even talk to.
After that I traveled abroad, then transferred schools,
switched my major, and you know,
left all my friends at that place.
I'm still extremely tight with all of them.
I talk with like, four of them yesterday, believe it or not.
- [Voiceover] Well I am today getting MT 6;34
which is a verse that says don't worry about tomorrow
because tomorrow will worry about itself.
And although it's not grammatically correct,
the colon is going to be a semicolon.
I have had like debilitating anxiety since I can remember.
It's really hard because there's a difference between like,
worrying about a test or worrying about a boyfriend
or something like that and when you're
sitting at like 2 o'clock in the morning thinking,
"Why am I not okay with life
when everything is perfectly fine?"
I've felt so much guilt with feeling so sad and anxious
about my life when people have such bigger problems than me.
You just feel so weak when you can't control your thoughts.
And then you like, start to feel like a crazy person.
I think there's times where you just can't continue
and that is the hardest thing.
I wanna talk about it just so I can
help other people with it because it is
a very real thing that happens to anybody.
- [Voiceover] The tattoo I'm getting is a quote that says,
"Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions."
And I think that just really resonates with me
because all of those kind of low points
really make you who you are.
I've been living with depression for
as long as I can remember, really.
I wasn't officially diagnosed until I was 20,
but I think a lot of that comes from not wanting
to talk about it.
It's easier for me to say, "Oh, I don't feel good this morning,
I was sick," or "I got locked out of my house," or "There
was traffic, there was an accident," instead of just being like,
"My depression hit me in the face with a brick this morning
and I couldn't get out of bed."
I think the semicolon speaks to me strongly because when
I was thirteen, I came very, very close to killing myself.
I was sitting on my floor in my bedroom,
with a bottle of Tylenol because I'm thirteen
and I thought that that would kill me. (laughs)
And it's laughable now, but at the same time
I was thirteen and I thought that would work.
Instead, I resorted to cutting myself for the next ten years.
Because that was easier than talking to people about
what I was dealing with.
And I shouldn't be afraid to be honest about
this very real illness that I'm living with.
- We did it!
- Yup
- We're done.
Now comes the actual hard part, I feel like, and that is
having the conversation that comes with the tattoo.
- Yeah, but I feel like, that's gonna be rewarding, so.
- Well it's definitely gonna be more rewarding
than it is difficult.
- Yeah.
- We're all in this together.
- Yay!
- Oh my god, it's like High School Musical.