Year of the Tiger

By the end of high school, I’d managed to shape a personality I didn’t really like. Uncertain, insecure and a bit pessimistic. I felt trapped. One day my mother handed me an ad for an American summer camp. So I went. 

I had the idea that I could lean into whichever version of myself I wanted. Everything was new, everyone was new. I could be new too. 

I stretched out, took some risks, laughed a lot and acted like a real goose at times. By the end of summer camp I was prowling around with confidence and joy, the whole thing was working. I chipped in with 7 other young adventurers and we bought a real dodgy van from a gravel-surfaced second hand car dealer by the highway. 

We drove south from New York in the packed van and had a great time. I was one of the two drivers and my ego continued to bloom as I sat bestride the rust coated, carpet lined machine. At one point we settled at a rented holiday house in the Florida Keys. Mid way through the week one of the girls in our group wanted get a tattoo, a stylised sun for her sun tanned ankle - a reminder for the sunless British winter waiting for her at home. I agreed to drive her to the tattoo shop.

At the beginning of the drive I had never thought of getting a tattoo, by the end of the hour I could think of no better way to mark my personal evolution. I was now the perfectly confident and rounded extrovert I’d convinced myself was great. A powerful animal roaming the world. All I needed now was an idea of what to get. 

Who was I? How did I interact with the world? What kind of picture would represent all this? 

The woman at the desk asked me something like ‘what are you going to get?’ My 19 year old brain spasmed and then spat out a tiger. It was after all, who I was now - also I played for a footy team whose mascot was a tiger, so it kind of added up. Thankfully I kept my senses about me enough to not get a literal tiger cut into my skin. But I did stumble into the symbols book, and selected a puffy Chinese Year of the Tiger character. Colour - sky blue. 


Of course the main catch is that I’m not a tiger. I wasn’t born in the Year of the Tiger. Very few of the characteristics of the creature actually match who I am at all. At times on that trip I was an inconsiderate and overly self-focussed person. I tried out tiger life and it wasn’t me. Turns out I’m the Year of the Rooster - all noise, feathers and strut, who really just wants to fit into the flock. 

Happy tiger year to all the tigers out there, and to all the other animals doing their best in the jungle.

A rooster who thinks he's a tiger.