I feel bad about my neck.
Like Nora Ephron before me, my neck-hatred was tied to my experiences with womanhood and my inadequacy to fit into the preferred mold. The back of my neck was a specific sore spot for me, one both metaphorical and literal. Often because I was being held and guided by the men in my life by a firm (sometimes violent) grip where my neck meets my back. Men loved to put their hands right on that bulbous, so-called buffalo hump (a medical term. For real) that had bothered me for years. What an ugly, monstrous thing for a young girl to have on her.
I often didn't realize that I was being a problem until I felt that hand was on the back of my neck and I was being pushed one way or another—by my father before he left, and by uncles and grandfather after that. I felt like a stupid puppy being reprimanded by a bigger, older dog who thought they knew better. And maybe they did. But it doesn’t mean you then get the right to take away my bodily autonomy, to move me so physically, as they did. I wanted them all to leave my neck the fuck alone, to stop touching me without my permission. Because it always felt so violent and aggressive, even if it was done “with love.” Because it never felt like love whenever anyone touched the back of my neck. Shame and anger would flood my body, and I, red-faced and snotty, would retreat to my room in the basement, or find a quiet place in the woods, or go on a long bike ride to nowhere, in order to avoid any more consequences for my myriad, mysterious transgressions that were so rarely explained.
Sara hit the hardest nerve, at the “um, boniest part of your back” as she put it, as “This Woman’s Work” by Kate Bush starts playing on the speaker to the right of us. Which would have been a bit on the nose if it weren’t for the fact that she was stabbing me in the back, literally, with a tattoo needle. It was our second session of three. As I held onto the massage chair, clutching it as, say, a desperate, naive, panicked young lover might the object of their desire, I found myself weeping. For a moment, I was no longer a 37-year-old woman, but a 14-year-old kid.
I know you've got a little life in you left
I know you've got a lotta strength left
I know you've got a little life in you left
I know you've got a lotta strength left
I should be cryin' but I just can't let it show
I should be hopin' but I can't stop thinkin'…
This new tattoo at the back of my neck was, at least on the surface, little more than a cover up of an old, washed-out tattoo from 20 years prior. But really, I knew I was getting it for the growth it represented, for the reclamation I knew I needed to do around a part of my body that shamed me. When I'd booked the appointment several months earlier, I'd felt convinced that I'd turned over a new leaf and was firmly ensconced in a new personal era. I was ready to feel the beauty I finally believed existed inside me, and I didn't want to lose sight of it again, as I'd done so many times before, in an attempt to fit into whatever mold.
So I got a tattoo I couldn't afford, and I quickly learned that the “new era” was only just getting her sassy ass started.
My issues with my neck stand as a foil to those that my mother also took with it. I remember her poking at it on more than one occasion, saying the phrases “buffalo hump” and “moon face” in a voice I am sure was intended as playful and funny. She was mocking the doctors and nurses who had told her I might have Cushing's Disease. It was a diagnosis I was oddly sort of desperate for, because maybe that would explain all my fat and why, try as I might, it never seemed to come off.
But these jokes, coming from a woman who made it her life's mission to make my body smaller, felt tinged with a bit of darkness and judgement that I instinctively wanted to rebel against, but wasn't sure why or how, because I, too, hated my weird, ugly body. It didn’t take much for me to internalize the ha ha ha, look at you and your stupid, gross body, being ugly and a failure yet again tone my mother brought to so many of our interactions. I’d adopted it as my own by age 8.
"Isn't it so weird?" she would say, staring at me from across the dinner table. Not just about my neck, but about my stomach and arms, too. My face, my legs. Anything and everything that was "too" this or that was fair game. She would grab at them in public, asking me too loudly why my body looked so different from other fat people's as she pointed or stared at another body she didn't like. I couldn't even be a fat person correctly. That's how big of a failure I was.
I was desperate to rid myself of this hump. And I was devastated when I was told that the only way I'd be able to if I lost weight enough to get rid of it (and my round, moon face!) completely. Because losing weight has always been the central focus and journey of my life—something that had proven time and time again to be impossible to do.
So the medical options given to me were essentially: starve yourself and hope for the best, or wear your hair down forever and be mindful of your angles.
A woman should always be mindful of her angles, of course. It is important to be aware of how you are seen and could possibly be perceived at any given time and contextual angle. Metaphorically and literally, too. Every girl knows this, we learn it so young.
How I was seen by others was quickly deemed more important than how I saw myself. To the point that I felt I needed to eschew every part of myself that people had found problematic or undesirable. Which, as it turned out, were a lot of parts of me.
When your anorexic mother shuffles you off to Weight Watchers with a doctor's note she forged to say it’s totally chill for her 8-year-old child to be dieting, the angle you focus on is "make yourself small." I was desperate to be less. I wanted to be dainty and feminine and thin like my mommy; I wanted to be relaxed and unflappable and contained—the only acceptable way to be a woman.
Sure, I wanted to act and sing and perform, but even before I'd hit double digits in age, I had so many old, overweight men telling me how successful I could be, "if only you could lose the weight.” Because nobody could really be a good singer or actor if they couldn't show off a flat navel, could they?
At this point I was maybe 13 years old and 5'10" tall. I was already over 200 pounds (a number I hit in 6th grade the year prior). I wore a size 12 in juniors clothes. I had boobs and a belly and an outsized personality to match. Only...nobody really likes a big personality on a big girl. That's simply too much space for one person to take up—especially a teen girl people find sexually undesirable or a bit less "feminine" than was expected of us at the time. Nobody likes the fat girl, but they especially don't like her if she's wearing JNCO Jeans, dressing in all black, and being a smart-ass about the lot of it.
Nobody was buying what I was selling. And I was miserable because of it. So I knew I needed to change—to toughen up and accept "reality," whatever that was.
I had internalized a brutal notion of who I had to be. Of what was expected of me in order to be seen and accepted as "being human" correctly. I was a happy student, though, so I did what I had to do to figure out the steps I needed to take to be accepted by the people who apparently loved me so much they wanted to change every single part of me. OK, well, game on. I had to become a girl stripped of the parts of herself that made her happy, feel alive. Curious.
I learned very quickly that I had to do that work alone, and that no one could really help me because I was clearly a lost cause. Why else would my mother always be so frustrated with me? Why else would these men in my life feel like they had to lead me around?
I had internalized the idea that I had to be alone, needed to be alone, would always be alone, because I was all the wrong things. It felt like the only way to survive it all was to steel myself and accept all feedback robotically. Get tough, smarten up, buckle down, become a machine that works and does not feel and is the cog in the machine, a spoke upon the wheel.
I believed if I was lucky, and worked hard enough that—because I was smart and obedient—maaaaaaybe I could correct the horrible errors in my genetic makeup and the other personal failings I had created by just generally being bad at being alive (the dumbest smart person my mom had ever known), and be deemed acceptable enough to enjoy the privilege of an autonomous life. If I could just get this right, maybe I would be allowed to be seen as human.
There was something about the song “One Girl Army” by Charlotte Martin that spoke to this inside of me, that I felt the need to brand myself with it to show people how self aware I was. I'd met Charlotte and learned about her music from her time opening up for many of the bands I was selling merch for as a teenager, often in exchange for free concert tickets.
Chin up
Every eye is on you
We don't guess the way you are
'Cause things are fine, well everything is never fine
A one girl army up against, she's up against
The whole world now
Alone, misunderstood, and up against the world, I felt that the song spoke to a sadness so deep within me. Its lyrics became a mantra of safety. This would be my first tattoo, I thought. I googled fonts and researched ideas for what I wanted. At one point I even thought of making it a bar code, with “one girl army” where the numbers would usually be. A cog in the capitalist machine, branded as such on the very part of my body that represented why I had to go and do it all alone.
(I’m forever relieved I never did this, for the record.)
I was 18 when I walked into The Edge tattoo shop in New Haven, Connecticut. I'd printed out the phrase "one girl army" in a font I'd found online, and a young, blonde twentysomething more interested in his cigarette break than my neck, got to work inking the words onto my buffalo hump. It tingled but did not hurt. It felt like an initiation. When it was done I felt prouder than I ever had.
This was it: I was finally going to become the steeled version of myself I thought the world desired.
The tattoo did not heal correctly—the ink fading in places before it even had time to settle. But I carried it on my back like a sigil. It already looked so worn, but so was I.
“Am I standing up straight? I always worry that my buffalo hump is showing,” I say to Sara as I stare at the stucco’d white wall in front of me. She’s positioning the back of my neck for a photo of her finished work.
She laughs at the term “buffalo hump,” telling me to drop my shoulders and just relax, and I explain to her that’s what the doctors said it was called, medically speaking. I tell her about the “moon face,” too. I do it in the voice my mother used to and she shakes her head, laughs politely, and says “wow,” in a way that feels worn in and knowing.
At this point we’ve spent probably 15 hours together over the course of two different tattoos—12 of them on this one alone. She knows more about me than she probably cares to (most people do), but I also imagine that happens a lot when you’re an artist working one-on-one in close proximity with another human. Like bartenders, I imagine tattoo artists probably become stand-in therapists whether they want to or not.
People have a lot of feelings tied up in and around their bodies. We get this art put on our bodies for so many reasons. Reclamation, validation, decoration—all of the above, and none. The pain of the needle can put you back into your body, remind you that you’re still alive, still here, still thriving in spite of (or because of) your past. Still moving that fucking body of yours around and living, even if you never became that perfect doll of a girl.
“You know, I don’t think it’s really there anymore,” she posits. I can feel her investigating and looking at the back of my neck with a bit of intrigue and surprise. It was definitely there in the last session when I cried to Kate Bush.
The details of how and why are a story for another essay, but over the course of getting my new tattoo, I’ve lost over 60 pounds. I feel like I am a different person than I was when we first started working together on this cover-up tattoo. In fact, I know I was. I think she knows it, too.
We say goodbye and part ways with a hug and “til the next one!” I wander out into the dark of Silverlake alone, a few tears gathering at the corners of my eyes. I sit in my car in the dark for a few minutes staring at the photo of the tattoo Sara took before I left. It’s beautiful, lush, verdant, fecund. There’s a tiny bee in a corner with some “pollinator pants” on, sniffing at a jasmine vine that curls around a sunset-colored rose and a paper-thin Matilija poppy, its fried egg center juxtaposing some purple anemones.
The tattoo feels wild and full and bigger than I anticipated. I was so scared of its size and vibrance, so worried I was “ruining” myself with something so large. I can’t help but laugh as I write that last sentence because it’s just so fucking indicative of the worries I’ve always had about myself. For forever. About who I was, who I was always meant to be, who I needed to be, and how that clashed with the immediate and wider world around me. Since birth.
The past five years have certainly changed the way I navigate those feelings. I came out of 2018 completely broken, spent a year trying to build myself up, only to realize the scaffolding was on shaky ground. And then the pandemic happened. And then I fell to pieces again, collapsing in on myself, drowned in self-sabotaging insecurities.
I felt like I had burned myself down to ash. That my fallow season had been for naught. That I was doomed to be unlovable, unemployable, undesirable on every front. I’ve always felt like someone people just used and could toss aside without consideration. I wasn’t a real, worthy woman, after all. I was replaceable: just like how my dad replaced me with another daughter named Alicia Lutes. I watered myself in tears of grief and rage for months, unaware that something new was incubating inside of me, ready to break through the surface and grow.
And then one day, when I was least expecting it, I realized what a beautiful garden I had in front of me. I realized the bounty, the beauty, the growth. This part of my that I’d long felt was so ugly, so hideous, so not my own, was now a work of art, a part of my body that made me feel gorgeous and special, connected to the earth and my body, my past, present, and future. And there’s no reason to feel bad about that.
I hope your book is called The Other Alicia