Completion

I slept uneasily, as I always do before a big day. Therapy was fruitful, and my taxi to the tattoo studio was early – and driven by the wife of a driver I´ve chewed the cud with on the journeys to pick up Timo´s bigger cage and my first visit at the fertility clinic. The world is small, and lovely. The taxi driver was abhorred about the idea that neuroatypicals can´t donate gametes, and that for a while I was in a position where my ability to access fertility treatments was looking very uncertain. It occurred to me then that my life is not useless at all. In my own little way, I do change people´s opinions about autistic people and what society is allowed to do with us. This is not the role I planned for myself, but I´m becoming a modest voice of the underdog. I´m exactly where I am supposed to be. Nothing that has happened since 2019 has been in vain. I can´t see the whole picture yet, it won´t be visible until I´ve reached the summit (or at least the next base camp), but this winding hike is getting me somewhere, and I think my body is starting to adapt to the strain of living outside the safety of normalcy.

Speaking of bodies, I am happy to have found a tattoo artist who understands the significance of tattooing as a form of accessible trans treatment for me. Of course, my hormonal balance or secondary sexual characteristics are not changed in any way by the ink, but every piece I have is a declaration of me taking ownership of my own body. This is why I´ve always been very careful about the work I get done: I´m not just getting cool pictures on my skin, I am making commitments. She was excited about a big project I offered her, but it will take some time to save up for it – unless I find myself a pot of gold by the end of the rainbow! For now, I was happy to get a beloved, but slightly shoddily made tattoo refreshed and improved upon. The end result is beautiful, and it only adds to the meaning of the work that it took six years to complete. The first layer was imperfect and dictated the outcome of the second to a degree, but this progress and the history of the piece is allowed to show in the work, as it is my history too. Thank you kindly, Virva from Loyal Elegance Tattoos, Korso, Instagram @virvatattoos. You did stellar work, and working with you was a pleasure. I wish you success in all your affairs, and I can´t wait to go under your skillful needles again!

I had an extremely strong déjà vu experience as Virva was adding the finishing touches to my tattoo. As I asked her whether a detail in the work could use some white ink, I felt as if I already knew the answer to my question, and saw a flash of the completed piece. A naturalist would say that it doesn´t take much of a clairvoyant to know beforehand that a tattoo artist will likely comply to such a question, but the details of the event matter less to me in this than the emotional impact of the experience. The last time I had a vivid déjà vu was at my friend´s wedding. I had them a lot as a child. For whatever reason, they often seem to be triggered by pain, discomfort, or danger, and while tattooing doesn´t bother me in the slightest, it is still a wound on the body and triggers certain psycho-physiological responses. I am also annoyingly familiar with jamais vu, but that one is fairly easy to explain through dissociative amnesia and autistic burnout. My déjà vu experiences are almost pleasant in a way, as they come with a sense of safety in familiarity: whatever is going on, has either happened before or been foretold, so there´s no need to fret about any of it. The sequence of events will proceed as fate wills it, and I feel a strange pleasure sitting in the eye of the storm and spectating it all unfold, positive or negative. Maybe I have some type of a mild, undiagnosed epilepsy, or maybe it´s just a symptom of migraines, but I don´t mind it either way.

I am quite tired. After we were done with the tattoo, I took the train to Tikkurila and ate at a Chinese buffet. ”There are many adventures waiting for you”, my fortune cookie promised, and I hope they are the nice kind. I also bought myself a tea thermos, because my energy drink habit gets both expensive and unhealthy and I need to unlearn it anyway as I´m expecting to expect. I found a pink glittery thermos with horn-like protrusions on the cork for cheap; the label claimed it was ”cat-shaped”, but I immediately decided to call it my glitteripiru (glitter imp). It´s a smaller, 300ml bottle, as I suspect that one of the reasons I can´t get results on my ovulation tests is that I drink so much water that my piss is too diluted for anything to show. I guess that a homeopath could take a swig and tell me what´s going on with my hormones at any given moment, as according to them, water has a memory, so even when diluted into meaninglessness, my piss would still hold the answers to my cycle, but I´m not into any of the concepts that went into constructing this sentence. Well, perhaps I am a little bit into the idea of water possessing divinatory potential. It would be fantastic if prophecies were real, at least up until the point of realizing that we would have zero wiggle room against our own destinies if they could be foretold. The whole concept of prophecy is also still a little bit too sore after my psych ward adventures of 2023. The Hell of the futility of trying to prevent something that is only a threat inside one´s own braincase is a very special one. Of course, perhaps fate could exist in a quantum superposition, and outcomes could be gently coaxed out of the fabric of the universe, not as in flipping a switch, but as in asking nicely and hoping for the best? A much less depressing approach.

Sometimes I feel tempted to write down some of the ”divinatory” thoughts I had during my psychiatric crisis just to see how many of them turn out to come true. But the issue with that is that I am constantly making choices that can either move me towards a goal or away from it. Likelihoods and cold readings are also not equivalent to magic. If I were to mention, for example, that the voices told me that my next partner will have a thing for feet, and has served as a volunteer in Ukraine, these details in a future partner would not make me a diviner. A lot of people like feet, and the Finns who went to volunteer in Ukraine are mostly of the right age group for my purposes, and directionless enough to have left in the first place. They weren´t family men. They were restless souls who either tried to go save the world or to satisfy their violent hearts in a societally acceptable, even ”heroic” manner. Those who make it back, each with varying degrees of physical and mental trauma, will be looking for partners – unless they are too damaged to ever be intimate again. The mainstream will be lost to them. They may not have realized it when they departed, but they surrendered normalcy forever, because such is the touch of trauma. Once transformed by it, no matter the cause of its origin, the traumatized have but one choice: to try and revert back to the people they were before, or evolve and accept the damage as a form of adaptation. Once you´ve grown gills you won´t make it in the desert anymore. So what can you do with gills then? Most likely form a school with other fish.

I´m not convinced that this was one of my best texts, but I wanted to document my thoughts after going through the tattoo experience and while being in the initial degrees of healing. I´m waiting for Virva´s permission to use the before and after photos of the tattoo in the blog, but as I´m waiting, I´m suffering second thoughts about whether I want to show the images at all. I have shown my face in this blog as it was captured by the artist Ben Vale in 2023, but I didn´t choose my face, so it says a lot less about me than the tattoo that I freely chose. Furthermore, I don´t much like my face or my body, but the portrait was a piece of activist art. My unfixed hideousness was the whole point of it. It feels much more intimate to share something publicly that was intended to beautify my existence. The portrait exists for a cause, the tattoo exists for me. It is kind of difficult for me to think of any reason why Virva would´t want me to share her gorgeous work, and I do want to make her known to my handful of readers. Perhaps asking was a form of leaving the decision of whether or not I should share the image to someone else. Do I accept my own meekness about this? Should I be brave and reveal something about myself that is more real to me than my body or face or my genitalia? Will it trigger an auspicious chain of outcomes? Become a problem down the line? Meaninglessly drown in the sea of data? Can I predict that she will consent, and act accordingly before receiving the answer? In all likelihood the answer is going to be yes; no outcome would be changed, but the act of sharing her work without her explicit consent would still feel wrong to me. Perhaps this is the biggest problem with prophecy and divination. How could you justify such a massive upper hand, when being cognizant of future events would strip the people around you of at least some of their consent? This is why the Goetian sigil I have tattooed on my skin is recognizable as to whom it refers to, but not designed ”correctly” according to the occult instructions: I refuse to bind or force anyone or anything, even a demon. If I am to receive something, I want to it to be the result of either a fair exchange or freely given. I think it´s a solid principle in human interactions, so why should my relationship to the Unreal be any different?

PS: Virva gave me permission to share the images of the tattoo before and after, and in time before the Blue Moon rises too! I doubt you, my dear readers, can quite grasp how naked I feel showing them to you, but we were all naked in Eden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxJ2LimcG9A