I did not grow up dreaming of tattoos. I never mapped out designs or imagined myself covered in ink. In 2013, when I was twenty, my father died. That was the catalyst. At the time, I was surrounded by teammates and older ballplayers who bore tattoos of their own. Maybe I was influenced, but the truer reason was grief. My first tattoo was simple: his initials etched into my arm. Not decoration. Not rebellion. A vow, a way of embodying loss, a way of carrying him forward.

Something shifted in me through that process. I discovered that I liked the ritual, the pain, the permanence, the artistry. More importantly, I liked what it did—how it gave shape to what I could not put into words. I began to see my body as a canvas, as blank terrain that could be turned into architecture. Ink became a visible record of the invisible, proof that I could make my internal world stand tall in public.

People assume tattoos are about aesthetics or rebellion, some people that is. For me, they are about adaptation. As Darwin recognized, life does not coddle you. It applies pressure. It selects. Pain, betrayal, grief—these are not elective courses; they are compulsory. What matters is how you reorganize yourself in response. Ink became my way of reorganizing. Each piece is a mark of transmutation: pressure applied, adaptation chosen.

And yet, nothing tested this philosophy more than 2019.

I had spent five years with the woman I loved—truly loved. We had names chosen for children we intended to raise together. I had devoted myself to her with full intention: to marry her, to build a home, to form a family. Then, mid-season, out of nowhere, a text arrived. A text message. A text message—cold, disgraceful, and abrupt. That was how she ended everything we had built. No conversation, no face-to-face reckoning—just the cowardice of typed words on a screen.

And as if that weren’t devastation enough, within months I heard through the grapevine that she was already engaged, already married, already expecting. The rapidity of it, the reckless speed with which she replaced what we had, was like a blade in the ribs. It was not only heartbreak; it was betrayal, humiliation, and erasure all at once. What I had believed sacred was treated as disposable. What I thought was solid was revealed as sand.

That moment nearly destroyed me. It was as if the floor of my existence collapsed, and everything fell into an abyss. For years, I had poured myself into this woman—into the vision of a shared future. To see it ended in such a disgraceful manner left me hollowed out, stunned, and broken.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Betrayal is precisely that line—it slices into you, tempts you toward bitterness, resentment, and destruction. Solzhenitsyn endured the gulags and learned that suffering can either corrupt the soul or cleanse it, depending on how it is met. In that moment of devastation, I stood at that same fork. I could have allowed betrayal to blacken me, to hollow me, to make me small. But I refused.

Instead, I made a vow. I would not allow this to define me. I would not let the disgrace of her choice corrode my own being. I would take that heartbreak—the rawest, deepest wound of my life—and I would forge myself into something formidable.

So I trained harder than ever. I became a monster of sorts. And I sat for hours under the needle. Every piece of ink was no longer simply art—it was reclamation. It was transmutation. It was the alchemy of betrayal into armor. The yin to the yang of my intellectual, introverted, bookish self. I carried the weight inside me, yes—but I forged an exterior that no one could ignore, one that declared: I endured. I adapted. I am still here.

Jordan Peterson often speaks about voluntarily shouldering responsibility, about confronting suffering directly rather than shrinking from it. That became my ethos. Tattoos were not escape. They were responsibility made visible. They were me saying: I will carry this pain openly, and by carrying it, I will overcome it. I will integrate it. I will be one with it.

My tattoos are not rebellion. They are:

· Architecture. A citadel of skin and ink, built to bear weight.

· Record. A ledger of impact and adaptation—proof that grief and betrayal struck, and proof that I reorganized myself in response.

· Antidote. Not to numb pain, but to integrate it—to bind suffering into meaning.

· Signal. First to myself: to stand tall, to keep aiming upward. Then to others: what you see here is not fashion, but selection.

When people ask why I am covered in tattoos, this is the answer: Because life tried to undo me. Because I loved deeply and was betrayed disgracefully. Because I was forced into the abyss—and I refused to remain there. Because I chose to turn grief, heartbreak, and chaos into strength, permanence, and order.

Darwin taught me that pressure selects. Peterson taught me that responsibility saves. Solzhenitsyn taught me that suffering can purify if it is embraced honestly. And so I chose—again and again—to meet suffering voluntarily, to bind it into my very skin, to walk tall with it, to declare it conquered.

My tattoos are not decoration. They are survival. They are memory transmuted into meaning. They are my vow that grief did not dissolve me, betrayal did not break me, and pressure did not define me—I did the selecting.

This is why I am covered in tattoos: not to be looked at, but to be held to.

Something like that…