Momento Vivere

March 20, 2026

I spent a few hours in a tattoo shop today, hanging out while Jack got inked.

What better way to celebrate turning eighteen than with a tattoo?

I did try to convince him to tattoo my face on his back—but he wasn’t having it.

Instead, he chose a sword, water, and the phrase Memento Vivere.

I had never heard it before.

Even the tattoo artist paused and asked what it meant, so we looked it up together.

Remember to live.

Or… remember that you must live.

We ended up having a whole conversation about it—about how easy it is to get buried under the weight of life.

The stress.

The responsibilities.

The constant awareness of what’s wrong, what’s missing, what feels out of reach.

Somewhere in all of that, people forget to actually live.

They stop creating their lives and start reacting to them.

And I do think that’s true.

But I also don’t think it tells the whole story.

Because there are seasons—real ones—where life isn’t something you’re “living” in that bright, expansive way people like to talk about.

There are seasons where you are in the dark.

Where grief, loss, betrayal, exhaustion—whatever it is—pulls you under far enough that the light isn’t easy to find.

And in those moments, you’re not forgetting to live.

You’re doing something just as important.

You’re surviving.

There were days I was breathing, but barely.

And even that counted.

And sometimes, survival is the most honest form of living there is.

I’ve spent time in that space.

Long enough to know it well.

And even now, there are moments when I can still feel the storm move through me.

Still, the longer I sat with that phrase, the more I realized how layered it really is.

And I don’t think it’s as simple as Memento Vivere.

Because for some people, hearing “just live” or “just be happy” doesn’t inspire anything—

it adds weight.

It adds pressure.

It quietly introduces shame.

Like they’re doing something wrong by not feeling light when life feels heavy.

But here’s what I do believe.

We are living through all of it.

The beautiful parts.

The brutal parts.

The in-between, messy, confusing parts.

And somewhere inside all of that, we still have agency.

We don’t always get to choose what happens to us.

But we do get to choose who we become in response to it.

We do get to shape how we move through it.

So maybe Memento Vivere isn’t about forcing joy.

Maybe it’s about remembering that even in the hard, heavy, uncertain parts, and in the in-between space as you move from winter to spring—

this is still our life.

And we are still allowed to create something meaningful with it.