And So The Saga Begins

At A Glance Author A little pierced patriot Contact i_love_paul_mcdermott@drugs4.every1.net Artist Myself Studio Like many I was forced to pierce in secret, so my room. Location Adelaide, Australia

It was the beginning of winter, the air was lightly chilled and the rain drummed gently on the pane outside. I sat in my bedroom, musing, as was my way at this stage in my life. I spent many idle hours just thinking, pondering - wondering about things, like what I was going to do with my seemingly aimless life. It was a time where I just meandered - something I've only recently left with no more purpose than I had when I entered. In a bout of depression a few weeks earlier I had deeply scarified my knee, leaving a keloided, angry red pentangle scarred forever into me - and only a week after my piercing experience, I cut it again and rubbed ink into the wound. Now the old scar tissue is purplish blue like a fresh bruise. But I digress: I was doing nothing in particular, and I found in my pocket a safety pin. Harken, I thought, it must be a sign from God. Well, I don't actually believe in God, so that part is fiction. But it did seem like a prophetic pin - I had been contemplating a piercing for some time.

Unlike a lot of people, my problem wasn't having the will and guts to actually get pierced, it was having to hide it from my mother. She is the sort of woman who always believes her children have something terribly wrong with them if they do anything out of the ordinary (never of course realising that this close scrutiny is perhaps a bit unhealthy for defective progeny), and at this stage she was waiting like a hyena that can smell blood for the first sign of any problem before dragging me off to a therapist. Actually, in retrospect, who can blame her? Still, this pin just happened to be there - so I made up my mind then and there that the pin would be through some part of my body before I left that room. So, choosing the one spot I thought I could hide easily from my mother, I decided on puncturing my navel.

I forgot all about the magical numbing properties of ice - which helped me beyond belief with my conch piercing later on - and just went straight for it. I avoided the biggest mistake I think anyone could make - I didn't get drunk in a vain effort to deaden the pain. A good friend of mine did that shortly afterwards and stabbed herself in the stomach with a pin - she's almost too uncoordinated sober to choreograph a piercing, let alone after sculling half a tumbler of vodka, straight up. It took a surprising long time to work the pin through - after all, it was only about one centimetre or so of pinched dermis - but after a few seconds the agony stopped and I was completely numbed. When the pin finally went through it was the strangest feeling. I can remember saying "God... it's in!" - and I couldn't believe that I had actually done it. I got the same sensation after piercing my upper ear - "I can't believe it". The part which hurt the most - after that few seconds of 'new piercing' euphoria wore off, was closing the pin so I could let it heal a little before putting in an earring. It stung like Hell, for a couple of hours, and I slept extremely erratically that night. Everytime I woke up I would have to check to see if it was actually there or if I just dreamt it. But it was - and is.

My experience was fairly good, although because I didn't ask there was a lot of stress and anger from older people and parents who just didn't understand why. They have an automatic association in their minds of piercing and the drug culture - which really shouldn't be made. I healed up fine with an approximately 1.5 mm thick silver bead ring, with no infection or complication, and I now have a surgical steel bar in my navel and a tiny replica faucet in my ear. The scars on my knee, co-incidentally, show no sign of fading. I will have them for life. I do actually sustain aspirations to be pierced again - I am desperate for a nose ring, not septum but rather nostril, and a central lip ring to complete my collection. Who knows, maybe more... but for now I cannot do anything without being labelled by horrible people with small, closed minds. Even my younger sisters call me a freak. I suggest that if anyone wants a piercing (or another) and reads this, that they discuss it with their parents first. But for anyone who knows that they can do it, I have one word for you which helped me every day for the first sore weeks of being pierced:

Betadine.