I got my first "real" piercing three days before my eighteenth birthday, and I was thrilled. At first I was terrified of that needle glinting menacingly in the darkened shop (there was a power outage). But a few weeks later, I felt like a real bad ass with that stainless steel barbell through my tongue. I would stick the ball out of my mouth and play with it "absentmindedly", secretly hoping to get comments. And sometimes, it worked. Most of my friends are straight-laced, vanilla, plainskin, or whatever else it pleases you to call them. To them, I WAS hardcore.
At A Glance Author Gwenn Contact [email protected] IAM mythernal When N/A Within a few months, though, this feeling of accomplishment faded. I considered a few other pokes, and eventually did get two cartilage piercings in my right ear. But if you had asked me then WHY I wanted this done, what the draw of piercings was, I'd have been at a loss to answer you. Finally, I came upon a new school of thought: body modification. This wasn't just piercing for the sake of piercing, it wasn't trendy, and it wasn't mainstream. I realized that what I wanted to do was to modify myself to my own idea of perfection. I realized that I was part of a community of like-minded people, and this was empowering.
I started modifying myself further. Most recently, I've begun a surface-bar corset in my lower back. As my most "extreme" mod thus far, I was understandably proud of it. When I went in to work the next day, of course I was showing it off to all my friends. There was one girl, however, that was home for the summer and covering someone else's shift. I'd never met her before, but "Sarah" seemed nice enough. She was curious as to the secret that everyone was getting hauled off into the kitchen to see. Not thinking anything of it, I told her.
"I started a corset piercing in my back."
And my jaw dropped as she gave me the most disgusted look and proclaimed:
"I don't understand how anyone can do that to their body. I've got my ears, my belly button, and my tongue, and that's enough for me."
Her TONGUE? My mind reeled. She had her tongue pierced and she was standing there judging me, mentally labeling me as a freak for all intensive purposes. I was dumbfounded as I compared her perspective to my own a few months prior. She saw her tongue as "normal" and I had liked to think of mine as "different". She had tongue piercings mentally equated to a navel ring. I knew I would eventually get negative reactions to my corset, but I didn't expect them to come from someone like Sarah.
It was with a heavy heart (and sore back) that I finished out my shift. When I came home, I logged onto BME to have a look at this situation objectively. Imagine my surprise when I found that standard navels are pictured about 2300 times, and center tongue piercings are pictured 2800 times. Could this mean that there are actually MORE people with a tongue piercing than a navel piercing? I'm not willing to make that assumption just yet. I think it's a real possibility that first, many girls with the single fashion piercing of a navel never make it to BME, and secondly, some people that have more extensive modifications may consider their navel "no big deal" and not bother to submit a picture.
Still, the numbers are there in black and white. And I began to see where Sarah might have gotten this point of view. Simple center tongue piercings are just not as "different" as I once thought they were. I began to have serious doubts about the validity of my own. After all, seriously modded people can't have trendy piercings, can they? I started seriously considering removing my year-old tongue piercing and getting venoms pierced so as not to be so mainstream.
I stopped. I love my tongue piercing. It's still my "first real piercing" and it's been with me for almost a year now. I smile when I think about the great experience that I had getting it done with my friends, and how it introduced me to my piercer. I felt like I would really be losing a part of myself if I took it out. So what if it's popular. I decided that I don't have to be contrary to everyone else. I don't have to arbitrarily reject the norm. I just need to be myself.
Now, at this point when I have fourteen different piercings in my body, I realize that while my first piercing was done at eleven in a mall, my first modification was hole number seven, my daith. Right, it's just an ear piercing. True, but it was the first one that I got with the intention of modifying myself. I'm glad I found this path, and I know that I will be following it for a long time to come, if not for the rest of my life. And if my path weaves in and I fall in step with someone else for a while, I'll just be glad of the company.