At A Glance
Author	Liz
When	N/A

Some people thrive on seeking out new experiences. They love love change, love the thrill of the unknown. I am not one of them.

I have had clinical problems with anxiety since I was nine years old. My anxiety has trapped me in my house, stolen opportunities from me, forced me onto drugs. It has pushed me into antisocial behaviour, self-destructive behaviour, and irresponsible behaviour. At times, the anxiety, this comparatively small part of me, has consumed my entire life. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing in me but fear. Sometimes it seems like I'm two people--myself, and someone who has no identity, who's drifting on a sea of fear.

This sounds like the beginning to a story about how I conquered my fear through body modification, how I let it show me that change is positive and take away my terror of the unknown. It's not. Close, but not. This is a story about how body modification helped me find stability through change.

To use a dramatic phrase, I've been trying to find out who I am my entire life. I've spent a good chunk of time having identity crises, and I've tried on about a million hats in trying to find the one that fit. I've spent a lot of time thinking about myself, who and what I am...which is probably obvious by this point in the story. And I never managed to come up with a definitive answer.

Is there a stable, continuous element to me? Where is it? Do I have an unchanging soul? I don't know...and I can't find out for sure. I won't always look the same, sound the same, know the same people or do the same things. My name can change, my address, my profession, my interests, my opinions. So how, I asked myself in an agony of uncertainty, do I know I'm me?

I never found an answer that brought me even a small measure of peace until recently. In the course of my searching, I've acquired a few body modifications, mostly in the context of religious ritual. The youngest of them is almost a year old, so I'm not really aware of them most of the time...they're just part of my body.

Every once in awhile, though, I'll meet someone new who'll be surprised that I have them. I'm a soft-spoken, polite young girl with a conservative haircut and conservative clothes, and people are often a little taken aback to find out that I'm both pierced and tattooed. A little while ago, an acquaintance found out about my tattoo. "You know, that will still be on your body when you're 80," he said, as if the thought would never have occurred to me.

"I know," I replied, as if no one had ever said that to me before.

"So what if you decide you don't want to be tattooed when you're 80?" he pressed.

I was not in the mood to justify my decisions to him, so I snapped, "What if when YOU'RE 80 you decide that you wish you hadn't asked me such a stupid question? Will you be able to erase the fact that you did it? Whether we can see them or not, our decisions stay with us. We are the sum of all the shit we do." (Well, except that I was a little angry, so I'm sure I said it much less articulately.)

And a lightbulb went off in my head. I WAS the sum of all the shit I'd done. Good and bad. That's how I knew I was me. And everything on my body that I'd put there trying to find the answer to "who am I?" was a testament to all those decisions.

This winter, I went through some very nasty anxiety. I was very nearly reduced to being housebound again, and I spent more than a few days totally disoriented. I didn't recognise myself in the mirror, pictures of myself seemed strange to me...I felt completely adrift. I thought I was going crazy. Sometimes, I was sure I was. But even at the worst of it, I had reminders stuck through and etched into my skin. When I didn't know who I was, I could look at the roadmap of at least some few of the decisions I'd made, and remember my life and the person it made me. The real one, not the person controlled by her fear. And, slowly, it would help draw me back into a more rational place, so that I could work on getting myself better.

I'd like to be able to make a sweeping statement like "body modification saved my sanity" or some such, but that's not true. In fact, that's the kind of statement that I've finally been able to reject. My body modifications helped me understand that there is no one thing that can "save" any one of us, just like there is no one thing that defines us. They helped me understand that I was the sum of my parts, not one all-important element. I got them as part of a search, but couldn't have predicted the way they'd give me the answer. My body is more than my temple, or my anchor, or anything else now. It's my way home.

It's a small epiphany, but to me, it meant a lot.