At A Glance
Author	strawberry
Contact	[email protected]
IAM	strawberry
When	N/A

I am sorry to hear about your new piercings. I liken 'piercers' to people who are 'cutters', people (almost all female) who mutilate their bodies with razor blades. It is an odd phenomenon, but relatively common and linked to self-loathing and an incapability of coping with emotional overload. At a certain point, piercing is not culturally esthetic. The same with tattoos. I don't know why you continue hurting yourself like that. I don't know what you need to prove or to whom. Whatever it is you need, ask for it, look for it, wait for it. Stop destroying your skin (and your self-esteem).

I know the game. You can't fool me.
Something is very wrong, and when it stops being wrong, you are going to wake up and find you have become a tattoed swiss-cheese, and you are going to have to live with that.
And that, is not fun.

This letter was sent to me by a close friend I haven't seen in quite a long time and to whom I'd mentioned my new labret piercings. I decided to share this with you, as I'm pretty confident that whoever has got into body modifications has, at some point, found a friend like mine, who, with your best interests at heart, has given advice about how to stop the horrible process of mutilation we've been doing to our bodies and, ultimately, souls.

I am a very negative and self-destructive person, and there is little doubt about this. I was anorexic for many years, I bing eat, I vomit, I overexercise, I sometimes cut. I have spoken to a number of doctors about these actions, and have received treatment and counselling for them. I'm not cured, far from it, but I'm better. However, I've never received treatment for my love for body modifications, even after going to therapy sessions with inked biceps in full display and lange gauge facial piercings. Besides, I didn't need to receive treatment for those -apart from the odd antibiotic prescription, or antiseptic cream.
I did get counselling because starving myself didn't allow me to have a life. I did go to a doctor because constant vomiting didn't allow me to have teeth. I do go to a specialist because my binge-eating is out of control and I feel possessed and I hate feeling like I have demons in my head and I prefer to talk about them with a medical specialist rather than with the voices I hear inside my mind.

Mutilation, by its own definition, implies some degree of sadness, sense of loss, regret and, possibly, anger. The Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most amazing pieces of art ever known to mankind (I'm a linguist, you will forgive me for this) describes mutilation as "2. a. More generally: the action of mutilating a person or animal; the severing or maiming of a limb or bodily organ; an instance of this. Also: the fact or condition of being mutilated or maimed", among other definitions. The connotations of the word are evident in their negativity, and in a text analysis I would consider it as containing tokens of inscribed judgement in negative terms. Mutilation, for the majority of people, is a bad thing. Mutilated are the genitals of African women, forced into excruciating procedures by their cultures, their tribes, their husbands. Mutilated are the Vietnam (and Iraq, too, these days) veterans who come home after fighting long and painful wars. Mutilated are people who are trapped in cars that lose control and leave them with missing limbs. Mutilated it's not me. I'm not my own victim, I'm on a daily quest for survival and, eventually, happiness.

I will not deny that there are people, included some of my closer friends, who cut to ease their pain and who get pierced to cope with self-loathing, who get tattoos to express their sadness. But it's not as if everybody who gets modifications is depressed, self-loathing and in pain. In the modified world, like in the rest of the world, there are reasons and motivations that cannot simply be labelled "mutilation" because it feels good to call them so, and for lack of a better word.
In my case I get pierced because I love the look of steel on my body. I enjoy having metal in my mouth, face and, least but not last, in my pants. I nurture my piercings, I nurse them back to health and wear them with pride. I am happy when I get them done. Hardly the state of mind of someone who is the victim of violence. I am not happy when I throw up. I'm not happy when I run two hours and my feet have blisters and blood all over. I'm not happy when I live on a diet of 800 kcal a day because I feel fat. But the sheer joy of having a new piercing (and a tattoo, or another modification) remains just that, joy, once the adrenaline and the excitement have faded into a peaceful state of relax.

I have numerous scars, too. Some of them are the result of a car crash, other I got during my body building years, other are self-done. Self-done, but not self-inflicted. They are beautifully intricate, and marked a very happy moment of my life when I got engaged to a person I loved and who loved me back.
Mind you, I'm not a needle freak. I'm not scared of needles, but I don't seek needles, either. I play pierce, but it's not like getting poked it's my favourite activity, and I don't long for blood tests to get that nice feeling of metal going inside your veins.
Piercings, tattoos, scars and more extreme modifications are ways to make me feel beautiful, complete, myself. I like my tongue half-split (although a proper split would be better, but it's something else that was self-done), I like my pants when they bling, I like to kiss with metal in my lips. It's sexy, it feels good and it's all mine.

Do I want to prove someone something? I know I can stand the pain, I know how to heal a modification, so it's not like I am proving myself anything here. I do like to see my body's reactions, but it's done with proper care and as much love as I'm capable off, rather than hate and self-loath. I have been modified since I was 13, and everybody who thinks of me thinks of my piercings and of my tattoos, too, so I'm hardly trying to impress anybody. The final truth about this passion of mine is that there is no final truth, and that I love it, and it is just unconditional love, self-contained.
My body seems to like modifications, too, as it heals fast and well, generally without too big a complication and the scars I get are even and small (unless I irritate them, but that's another story).

If anything, 8 years of body modifications have made me a better person, more open-minded, more in touch with my body, keen to listen to its reactions and its responses, and much less self-concious. Which is hardly what I could say about my other, real self-mutilations, which have not given me neither confidence, nor happiness.

In the letter she sent me, my friend asked me to get help. I'm getting it. I'm getting it for what I need being helped, not for what I loved to do and have no intention to stop doing. I appreciate her concern, and do care about her point of view, but she just doesn't know the game. And I'm saying this with all my love for her, who's been a loyal, supporting friend through thick and thin.

I hope that parents and friends of people who they think "self-mutilate" like me are reading this, and thinking about the exact meaning of the term "self-mutilation". I do respect everything that's done with good intentions, and most concerned parents and friends surely do it with good intentions, the warnings, the shocked faces, the tantrums. But please, please look for the signs: surely something that makes you happy, and I mean genuinely so, not just high, cannot be bad for you, as long as it's done with proper care.
I know that it may just not necessarily be your own idea of good. But that doesn't make it any worse, or any more destructive.