I have never been afraid of needles. Phlebotomists who draw my blood have commented that, unlike most people, I don’t look away when I have blood drawn for testing or an IV put in. However, I am deeply terrified of commitment, and that’s why it took nearly 33 years on this planet for me to take the plunge and get a tattoo.
The tattoo’s design is based around the DC state flag. Most state flags are, well, terrible: state seals on blue backgrounds, hard to distinguish from other states and boring from a distance. (Connecticut is absolutely included in this.) DC, however, has a simple, visually distinctive, aesthetically pleasing flag that I’ve always really liked. Last fall, as it sank in that I was leaving DC for good, I started thinking about commemorating my time here and came back to the flag.
The quote inside the red bars, “We are the change that we seek,” is taken from then-Senator Obama’s speech on February 5, 2008, on Super Tuesday. It was, as you may remember, a close contest between him and Hillary Clinton and the road ahead to winning the nomination and the presidency was long and difficult. He spoke to his supporters, many of whom were new to politics and inspired by him, to encourage them to keep going and do the work.
You see, the challenges we face will not be solved with one meeting in one night. It will not be resolved on even a Super Duper Tuesday. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys who have so little, who've been told that they cannot have what they dream, that they cannot be what they imagine. Yes, they can.
Like so many people my age, Barack Obama was the first person I ever voted for, as a newly minted voter at the Mansfield Town Hall on November 4, 2008 as a freshman at UConn (yes, of course I voted in every downballot election too, but I filled in his bubble first) and the first politician I’d ever volunteered or worked for. I didn’t know it yet, but he was the first of many. He was why I showed up at the first College Democrats meeting as a shy, nervous freshman and immediately signed up to go knock doors in New Hampshire with a car full of people I barely knew.
I was interested in politics before Obama. As a kid, I was a voracious reader and kept up with the news from a young age, and I saw things that I knew weren’t right. I watched in horror as a young teen when we went to war in Iraq over what turned out to be faulty intelligence and, as the price of toppling Saddam Hussein, sent our troops to die and kill in the violent power vacuum we’d created. I realized at the age of 14 that I was queer, right around the time a rash of states passed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage or any recognition of same-sex unions in 2004. But I didn’t know what to do about any of it.
Barack Obama not only gave me hope that things could be better, he helped me see that I could be part of making things better. So I knocked doors to help convince people to go vote for him (he eventually won New Hampshire by nearly 10 points, so he didn’t really need me, but still), I switched my major from chemistry to political science (full disclosure: the D in multivariable calculus also helped me realize I didn’t want to major in chemistry), and I went to work in politics, eventually moving to DC to work in political polling.
And I’m so proud of what I did. My contributions are small, yes, but they matter. I cut my teeth working on Congressman David Cicilline’s campaign in 2012 and watched him go on to serve admirably as a manager of Donald Trump’s impeachment. I helped the DCCC pick up a few seats for Democrats in Congress even on that darkest of days that saw Donald Trump elected President. I polled for a special election in a state senate race in Washington. It was overshadowed the night it happened by higher-profile wins in Virginia and New Jersey, but it gave control of the Washington state senate to Democrats for the first time in nearly a decade, leading to a flood of legislation that funded education, protected a woman’s right to choose, improved physical and mental health care, and protected LGBTQ+ rights. Even in losing, I and the others I worked with did good work. I was and am very proud to have polled for Michelle Nunn’s 2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in Georgia - though it wasn’t yet time, that campaign and the voter registration and turnout efforts around it laid the groundwork for turning Georgia blue in 2020.
And I did most of that while living in the DC area for 10 years - most of it in DC proper (first Hill East, then Brookland), but with stints in Vienna, VA and Bethesda, MD as well. Connecticut is and will always be home, but the DMV is where I feel I fully matured and finished growing up. I made so many good friends there and experienced so much of life. I wouldn’t trade my time in DC for anything.
Most importantly, the values that led me to DC and that work, even though neither are right for me anymore, are ones worth keeping with me and commemorating, and that more than anything else is why I wanted this tattoo. I’m still the same woman who took a train to DC in April 2013 with a couple of suitcases, crashed with family for a couple weeks, and found a spare bedroom to rent. I’m still the woman who worked tirelessly, trying to perfect my craft of polling and give the very best advice to campaigns I could, because I knew getting it right mattered. I brought about change in my own life, driven by a higher purpose of making things even just a little bit better for all of us. I’m going to be doing that a little differently moving forward, but it’s still what I’m doing, and everything I went through and learned in politics and DC will help me do it better.
As for the actual experience of getting a tattoo, it was better than I expected! I made the trek to the wonderful Nicole Coogan of Banner and Bone Tattoo Company, Mary and Ben’s beloved tattoo artist of many years, in New Bedford, MA. It was a long drive, but I knew I could trust her to do good work, and it was extra important to me to make sure I was in good hands for my very first tattoo.
The process took about two hours in the tattoo studio. I’d emailed my design idea when setting up the appointment, but didn’t have a formal consultation beforehand, and Nicole and I finalized font and placement choices before putting ink to skin. I was worried about pain, as my pain threshold isn’t the highest thanks to sensory processing disorder, but it wasn’t bad at all. The outline and writing work barely even hurt at all, I thought it was like getting blood drawn. Nicole used a larger needle for the red infill ink, and that hurt somewhat more, but was still perfectly tolerable. I brought a book with me (Destiny of the Republic, which I’m about halfway through now and finding quite engaging) and that was plenty to distract me. As I was driving home, I noticed a bit of soreness at the tattoo spot, kind of like a sunburn or a flu shot, but it’s faded in the past few hours.
I don’t know yet if this will be my only tattoo or the first of many, but I’m really happy with it and glad I took the plunge!