My Year Of The Snake
new year new masochism
A few days ago, as the winter sunset bathed the hills of Los Angeles in a gentle pink, I lay shivering on a table in a small apartment with all the windows open. Over the course of two and a half hours, I carved a fresh wound into about 11 inches of my skin. Or, rather, the woman weilding the needle did.
Unfortunately for a certain subset of my readership (and fortunately for another), this did not mark an exciting foray into BDSM needle play, but rather was just a new tattoo. New year, new symbolism, and the symbol I’m taking into this year is a long, thin snake, curling around some of my most tender skin.
I’ve had a potent relationship with snakes my whole life. I think “ophidiophobia” was the longest word I knew for a large section of my childhood. My earliest nightmares featured snakes prominently. They started when I was about four. In the dreams I’d be making my way across the monkey bars, then watch as they turned into snakes under my hands, and I’d plummet into a pit of them. This was when I’d wake up, panting, and have to decide whether to sit alone with the terror or crawl into my parents’ bed. Once, in the most vivid dream I’ve had in my whole life, I was in my parents’ bed looking straight into the eyes of a green snake. It was coiled in the beige sheets, under the nineties comforter bedecked in a blue and red watercolor pattern in the style of those nineties solo cups. The snake looked back at me, emotionless. This wasn’t an animal filled with cartoonish joy like those that covered the pages of my Richard Scarry books. It was real, its scales glinting under the wan light of dawn. From this point on, the snake took on the terror of being alone in the world, the knowledge that even though I was still small, life would be filled with many experiences that were mine alone, things I’d never be able to perfect explain, even to the ones who loved me most. Even to the ones that were meant to protect me from danger.
It was during a recent psychedelic-experience-not-to-be-specifically-named-on-this-public-newsletter (but it’s probably the one you’re picturing) that I realized this fear didn’t actually belong to me, but to my father. “Dad is afraid of snakes” is something I remember hearing from a very young age. From the position of my present day armchair psychology, it’s easy to see that as an impressionable young one, I could sense the dramatically shifting tides of my father’s moods, the way his love would slip out from under me like quicksand, and therefore made the association between his untreated bipolar disorder and the unpredictable reptilian object of his fear.
Parents often impart fear as an act of love — if I can make you afraid, I can keep you safe. And my parents were fear professionals. Both of them had lost older brothers at very young ages — my father’s brother drowned a river when he and my dad were skipping rocks together, my mom’s brother died suddenly in a drunk driving accident when he was a teenager. They both subsequently formed their entire personalities around shielding themselves and anyone around them from pain. To the point that if I ever felt pain, it was a betrayal of their hard work. My therapist once asked me what I remember feeling in childhood, and my immediate recollection was of having my fists clenched and lips rolled inwards a lot of the time. Not breathing. I was stifling something at all times. To be good.
But as I watched sunset descend on the desert around me the day of my trip, reality had completely disassembled itself and I could see the fear and the snake as the separate component parts they were. The distant hills took on a snakelike quality, their rolling spines suggesting something of the belly-bound creature that had long melted me with terror. In that moment of objectivity, though, it became clear that maybe it had never been about the snake itself. Maybe it was always about being alone with a spoiled love I couldn’t understand.
Carving the symbol into my skin brought with it another kind of psychedelia. It was the longest and most detailed tattoo I’ve gotten to date, and on one of the more sensitive parts of my body. As the artist worked, my nervous system followed the wending, winding paths of the needle, flooding me with endorphins, then adrenaline, then losing steam and leaving me totally sober to endure the cutting. I pictured the sensation like a welding torch, shooting sparks off me and through me. Eyes closed, I was carried into a deep part of myself, a childlike place, where all that pain I suppressed with my tiny, insistent fingernails on my palms could come out.
Starting this year with an open wound felt isolating in a strangely delicious way. Chosen suffering can anoint you in a way no other sensation can. Pain is an organic part of our life cycle. It’s a decider. It’s a marker. Without it, we wouldn’t know what felt good. And my pain, chosen or otherwise, is exclusively mine. I’m alone with it. On that lonely plane I can meet the parts of myself that need the most care. And maybe now, as an adult, I can lie calmly in bed with that glittering snake and know that life is one long staredown with fear. It’s when you invite it into bed that you can shed the smaller self that couldn’t sit with it.
thank you for sharing this🫶🏾i’m crying!!!
Snakes have always been a potent symbol for me...I was the weird kid catching garter snakes in my yard and making friends with them, and now I use a lot of snake magic is my wotchy practice. Medusa has been a patron deity of mine since high school...last year I finally got her tattooed on my thigh. Welcome to the initiation 🖤