Finding your inner carrot

I have a tattoo of a carrot on my inner forearm which acts to combine good memories with the bad. It represents one of the best periods of my life but I got it tattooed during one of the worst periods of my life.

When I was nineteen, I traveled the US volunteering and staying with farmers. I volunteered with the Californian Conservation Corps, working on things such as planting trees and digging up weeds, meeting amazing people along the way. Following this I was visiting sustainable farms in California. At one point on one of these farms I met another young traveler who invited me to join her on a trip to Arizona, I thought why not and jumped in her car.

We ended up meeting and going on an overnight hike with a man who was essentially a doomsday prepper. He had a property only accessible by foot with loads of food and water stored and was in the process of creating a house here. The hike he took us on was incredible and like nothing I had experienced in Australia, pure desert, cacti included. One of the most memorable moments of this hike was when he pulled off his shirt to reveal a gun in his waistband. As an Australian, whilst a lot of my family own guns for hunting, it is not common practice to carry a handgun around, thus this was a little bit of a surprise. In the end the hike was highly memorable as one of the moments in my life where I stepped out of my comfort zone, went with the flow and met amazing people and had amazing experiences. The reason for the carrot was this fellow traveler had a saying "find your inner carrot" which relates to the inner root of a carrot tasting sweeter, therefore finding your inner carrot means to find your inner sweetness or kindness. This saying has stuck in my head for its odd but wholesome meaning.

Fast forward four years to when I was twenty three and struggling with my mental health. I had struggled with my mental health a lot in the past but it had gotten particularly bad and I had been admitted to a psychiatric ward. Strangely enough, whilst again meeting amazing people, my stay on the ward and the general state of my health at the time was like a sour taste in my mouth. I had been in the ward for five weeks and upon leaving was due to go to another mental health facility. My life, my job (which I loved) my relationships, everything was on hold and I was incapable of functioning in the real world. The world of the psychiatric ward is an altered reality, no job, nurses checking up on you every hour, medications being dispensed, no need to cook or clean, just trying to heal. On my final full day on the ward before I was discharging I took some leave with a fellow patient to go to the shops. On the way back there was a tattoo shop and in my mind I said "Stuff it, I'm getting a carrot tattoo". Somehow the odds worked in my favor and despite not booking or ever having spoken to the shop there was an apprentice artist who was free at the time and willing (actually quite excited) to tattoo a carrot on my arm. My time traveling with this other young woman had left me with such great memories I wanted a reminder of these times almost as a way to overwrite the memories of being in a psych ward.

Now it serves as a reminder of great times, a reminder to be kind and a rather entertaining story when people wonder why I have a tattoo of a carrot.