Personal Narrative: My Tattoo

“I’ve got life, I’ve got love, I’ve got faith and that’s enough. We feel sorrow, we feel pain, but there’s sunshine after rain. So I’m alright.”

Five years ago, my friend and I wrote a song. That was our hook. It was grammatically incorrect with its excessive comma use, wasn’t anything tremendously creative, and wouldn’t win us any Grammys. But we liked it. It was catchy, and it was true to who we were at the time.

Last year, I got a tattoo. Mom wasn’t thrilled about it, but when I gave her my lengthy reasoning behind it she got on board. I had been battling mental health issues for years, but was finally out of the woods and doing much better. There had been times I was ready to give up, but with the incredible support system around me,

It represents love, faith, family, and strength. The fifth value I chose is something I couldn’t possibly get tattooed: humility. The notion of permanently – and publicly – declaring yourself as a humble human being seems to me one of the least humble things you could do. If I’m being honest, even choosing it as a value and writing about it feels a bit strange. At its core, humility works best in silence. Writing a paragraph about how humble I am makes about as much sense as bringing nothing but winter coats on a tropical vacation. Rapper Frank Ocean articulated my beliefs on humility just about perfectly: “Work hard in silence. Let your success be your noise.” The career path I’ve chosen, whether it pans out to being a Sports Information Director, Athletic Director, or something else I haven’t considered yet, is a path of service. It is a path where my job is to give my coaches and athletes the best possible platform for their own success. Their success is mine, and my success is theirs. I don’t want or need the world to see the hours I put in behind the scenes to make every game the best it can possibly be. The positive response to tweets, graphics and other media content will be my “noise”. The Power-5 conference caliber recruits that choose to come to the loving family environment of my smaller school’s athletic

Choosing my values wasn’t too difficult; years of mental health issues led to years of therapy, which forced me to understand who I truly am. Writing why they matter, though, has been nearly unbearable. I don’t feel like my words can do these values justice. A few sentences about my family, a Frank Ocean quote and a little backstory about a tattoo hardly seem like enough to capture just how much my values have built me. At the end of the day, they’re just words. And yet at the same time, those words are everything I am, and everything I hope to continue to be. Maybe five years ago when writing a song, my friend and I went with the first words we thought of. But maybe, just maybe, they were the first words we thought of because they were everything that mattered. I’ve got life, I’ve got love, I’ve got faith, and that’s enough. In truth, it’s more than enough. It’s everything I’ll ever