Fishing for Luckies

At A Glance Author piscesiscariott Contact [email protected] Location England

Fishing for luckies

Ideas are often forced upon us by our parents and they have this great impact on our lives, I never knew that my ideas on body art were so ill informed until I left home for the first time.

Some of my earliest memories as a child are of parental lectures where I would be told that body piercing was for people of little or no personality and tattoos just were not to be thought of. I never really questioned this - I don't suppose you do when you are a little kid in the country, isolated from anything that deviates even slightly from the norm.

I grew up to question a lot of what of the things I was told, thankfully my parents were open minded enough to instil in me a value of questioning what I was presented with (I suppose that is why I am a scientist now). I never really thought to question their views on body art until I left home for university.

Up until the point I left home I was always left with a queasy feeling in my stomach when anyone would discuss body piercing, it was a feeling like those inhumane treatments psychiatrists would do on people who lived outside of the social norms, I was conditioned to feel like this by my parents.

The magic of a wide spectrum of people and a permanently open (and super-fast) internet connection at college allowed me to explore the world outside of the small town mentality that was instilled in me. I suppose leaving somewhere where the people were this homogenous bunch of automatons where I never really fitted in, to go to this big city where I could be who I wanted, was this great liberation. I spent many nights discussing all things alternative, the kind of things that were just dreams to me as a child in my little room, with this wide group of people I would never have had the opportunity to speak to at home.

I somehow found the BME (on one of the many sleepless nights in front of the computer) and saw for the first time what piercing and body art was about through the eyes of the actual people involved. I would like to say it was something of a revelation, but I came to it slowly. With all new ideas you just take things in slowly. I was at a place where I finally felt comfortable with all aspects of depression, sexuality and lifestyle (even if my lifestyle did mainly involve sleeping and surfing) and I had begun to come to terms with body piercing.

In an environment where you have no controls on what you are doing, you are free to experiment a little and push the boundaries and get a feel of what your ideas are. There are many people around there who want to shove their ideas down your throat, usually the first people to do that are your parents, mine were pretty good in that the only dodgy idea they gave me was about this lifestyle, but many people are less lucky.

There are always people who will feel at the edge of the normal boundaries of society and I always felt like that. To my (albeit very innocent) mind the 'cult' of body piercing was not too far fetched from my values as a person. I read the BME pretty much every day looking at the resources and basically opening mind to this new expression of personality that was laid in front of me.

I must admit I became something of a piercing evangelist to my pierced friends, berating them for going to piercers with shoddy practices and offering tips on after care. I only now realise that I probably sounded like a twit, but I had found this knowledge of something that was denied to me and I wanted to share it.

You look around the street with the 'cool' set with their multiple piercings and badly healed cartilage piercings, and feel a pang of regret that this beautiful thing has become tarnished by the masses getting pierced in malls with their girlfriends. I know there is a flip side to the argument that anything that raises the profile of piercing is good for it, but to my mind the hair salons that pierce little girls are missing out on the whole spiritual aspect of body piercing. I suppose we just have to live with all aspects of life even if we personally find them a little distasteful.

It seems strange coming from this background where piercing was forbidden, to be considering my own future and to make some commitment to this form of expression I have found, and found to be full of people who have bright personalities and are every bit as interesting as the people I was forced to be with as a child (a lot of the people who contribute to the BME are probably a lot more intelligent than the folk I bump into).

Here I am after living away from home for two years and my mind has been opened to something that I thought was wrong. Maybe one day I will get some piercings, (there are some I really like the look of, but I have an awful lot of time to decide, so why rush?) but until then I have managed to overcome this conditioning that has been implanted in my mind, to become a little more open minded.

It makes me laugh now that there are people who stumble across the website and complain that what it represents is disgusting and wrong. What kind of small-minded rubbish is that? Even if things seem odd to you there are probably people out there to whom such things are the norm. I wish the people who complain with no knowledge would just read a little before they do, maybe they might be enlightened enough to embrace some new ideas.