Today I did something I never thought I’d actually do. Something I thought was only for other folks, but not me. Something that made me realize I’m braver than I think I am. Something a little crazy, but not too much. I got a tattoo. I went to the shop with my daughter and her husband, home from the Navy on short leave before she goes to training school and then them to her next duty station. We had fun, and I’m so incredibly glad we went together.

It’s not too large. It’s on my left wrist. I’m the middle arm in the photo above. For me, it means that my story didn’t end when I made a somewhat bad decision long long ago. My story didn’t end when I had a really bad day recently. My story didn’t end when I thought I’d go crazy from work or the bar exam. It continues, and it will continue to do so for a long time. I joined the Semicolon Project movement, but for me it’s more personal than that. It’s my own semicolon project, right here in my own life.

I was inspired by a friend who poured out her heart and soul on social media last year, when she told everyone about the ups and downs in life that she had been facing. Her family intervened, and she got the help she needed to be able to move past the issues, deal with them, and carry on with her life. I never knew that she had these issues. I don’t think most of us did. She was always a happy person on the outside – and she was the first to admit it on social media.

We all present the side of ourselves that we want the world to see. Some of us present the only side we have. Some hide the sorrow and pain we feel, built up inside for whatever reason, from the world, showing the sunny side because we believe it to be the only side that anyone will like, care about, or accept. Showing that dark, sad side has such a stigma, as we are “living in the greatest country in the world” and we have “food, water, a roof over our heads” and we have the ability to get a good education and “live out the American Dream,” unlike so many other people all around the world. Yes, all of these things can be true for many of us. That doesn’t mean, though, that we can’t be sad. There is death, destruction, heartache, strife, and pain in our world, just like there is in other parts of the world. I am in absolutely no way whatsoever saying that I believe we have it harder than someone who has no home, no food, and no healthcare, so don’t get all bent out of shape about that. I’m just saying that simply because someone seems to “have it all,” that doesn’t mean that he or she also signed a contract in exchange for “all” that he or she would also never be sad, lonely, tired, anxious, fearful, or depressed. It doesn’t work like that.

There was a famous actress a few years ago who had a beautiful newborn baby. The actress, a spunky girl who was seemingly full of life and of her own existence prior to the child’s birth, had serious postpartum depression, to the point of being so depressed that she nearly harmed her child and herself. That actress also “had it all” – a big house, a great career, a wonderful partner, and a new beautiful healthy baby with ten cute pink fingers and toes and no congenital defects or issues. Some folks said she wasn’t thankful enough for her life, and that they would love to be in her shoes, with “it all”. Some folks empathized with her, knowing what the hormones are like postpartum, when your body and mind are exhausted to the point of nearly no return for the fourteenth night at 3am. Thankfully, she got the help she needed, ridiculed or not, and came out on the other side, surviving to, as James Bond would say, “Live Another Day.” She didn’t let her pain and anguish stop her completely. She was able to move ahead after that pause in her life. There is a price that folks pay for being famous, for working a hard and taxing job – muscle or brain-wise, and for being successful in whatever they choose to do. Sometimes that price is stress, a body trying to compensate for worry, which leads us down the thorny path toward a very dark place. In other words, what starts as a straight and sunny primrose path, paved in the smoothest jackrabbited concrete you can possibly imagine, polished to a high glossy sheen, sometimes becomes a winding, mountainous, rocky, and seemingly never-ending path with Kansas-in-March tornado skies and a torrential downpour. There are many paths you can step off to get off that path, some taking you into a place from whence you will never return, but there are some paths that lead you to back to the well-lit, sunny path and on to the rest of your life. You have to choose wisely.

So many of us who have experienced great triumph followed by great tragedy, great strength followed by great weakness, or great wellness followed by great illness. In life, nothing is ever absolutely guaranteed. For instance, just because your parents own the company, you work for them, and you feel like you’re set for life in easy work with high pay, things happen every day that might cause the company to fail, your parents to sell it and move to Aruba, or someone to make them a Godfather offer, leaving you out of a job and on your own. You may have a clean bill of health one minute, and have a tragic accident playing hockey the next, leaving you in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. (I had a professor like this once – amazing guy.). You just never know. The one thing you cannot do, however, is give up. You have to keep going on.

The basis for The Semicolon Project is that, in a sentence, those little punctuation marks mean something individually. We all learned this in grammar and English classes throughout school. A period is the end of a sentence. Quotation marks mean someone is saying something! A comma is a slight pause, used to set off something or to have a natural place to take a breath and maintain normal conversation in our heads when reading material (that’s what I’ve always thought, anyway) (and see, you just did it when you read that sentence). A semicolon is used in between two pieces of one sentence, where those pieces could technically be their own independent sentences. (Think the USSR, with all those little parts broken off after Gorbi, Thatcher, and Reagan all came to an agreement and became friends – ahhh those were the days!) A semicolon means that you pause, you could stop but you don’t really want to – so not enough to end the sentence like a period (gasp!), but to emphasize to everyone that you ain’t done yet. (Sorry Ms. Bone. I know you hated that word, but it was ultra-appropriate here.). You have chosen to move ahead, and go into the next part of the sentence. The sentence of your life, acknowledging that there was a prior sentence, that you overcame, kicked its ass, and have decided you won’t let it drag you down anymore. You have chosen to forge ahead into a bright new existence, even if it might become dark again in the future, with another semicolon somewhere on the distant horizon. You see, they are quite helpful little punctuation marks and nothing to be afraid of, unlike Mr. Kidwell tried to tell me in our first paper-writing class (NO ONE SENTENCE PARAGRAPHS!). I walked out of class on that one – in 9th grade I believe. I actually walked out of class that day, but that is not where my writing ended. It’s where it began, as I knew that other authors – like real deal published authors – had one-sentence paragraphs all the time. In every book I’d ever read just about. Not that he was wrong, per se, but I knew that my story to write didn’t end there. It was just a semicolon on my journey.

I have been through a lot over the past 10 years or so. A lot of good. Some bad. A whole lot in the middle. We’ve traveled, we’ve celebrated, we’ve lost loved ones, we’ve been sick, we’ve been well, we’ve been anxious, we’ve been calm. We have simply lived. Although there have been a few times where that primrose path turned downright mile-wide Oklahoma prairie F5 fraidey-hole tornado dark, I’ve kept going. Even though there have been many moments when I wanted to hide under a rock, I kept going. In other words, I mentally marked that semicolon and carried on. It was absolutely not always easy, and I have no fantasy that it will be any easier from here on out, but I do know that the sunny skies can and will come back. Taking time to pause, realign, look around, and realize the beauty in life takes effort, a damn good bit of it from time to time, even . More than you ever want to or thought you could put forth. Life isn’t easy for most people, just the ones on TV, and not always then.

I hope this tattoo will remind me not only of my many semicolons in life, up to this point and in the future, but also the very enjoyable time I had this evening with he two of them. I haven’t enjoyed doing something this “crazy” since my son, his girlfriend, and I hopped that train from Philly to NYC on our own one June evening in 2009. I also hope that it will serve as a reminder that life, indeed, goes one, with or without me, but I’d much prefer it to be with as to without.

As Ms. Bone would say, even in your darkest moments, Pandora’s box has hope at the bottom.