Arc Tangent

As of the start of Novem­ber, I have a labret pierc­ing — a piece of metal in my lip, on the right hand side of my lip.

(You can see it there, honest!)

It was some­thing that I thought care­fully about hav­ing done. It wasn’t a spur-​of-​the-​moment type thing; I con­sid­ered it over sev­eral weeks. Facial pierc­ings can have very neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions among the older generation(s); the pre­vail­ing opin­ions amongst peo­ple of a cer­tain age and mind­set range from “they look messy” to an innate (and I would say unrea­son­able) regard of any­one with a pierc­ing as a good-​for-​nothing troublemaker.

The best argu­ment against the pierc­ing that I could think of was that it could neg­a­tively impact my rela­tions with some exist­ing and poten­tial clients.

I went ahead with the pierc­ing, obvi­ously. I chose to get it done as a reminder of a place and a time, the peo­ple who were around me and the sort of lessons I’d learnt in the years and months lead­ing up to it. My mem­ory is good (very good, in fact) — but human mem­ory is fal­li­ble, it fades and dis­torts with time. The pierc­ing is a way of exter­nal­is­ing some of those mem­o­ries — a sort of phys­i­cal mnemonic for those things I want to ren­der impor­tant in my recollection.

I often ask other peo­ple with pierc­ings or tat­toos if they have some spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance, and there’s a huge range of responses. Peo­ple have these sorts of body mod­i­fi­ca­tions done for a vari­ety of rea­sons. For some, it’s all about the aes­thetic. Some get a feel­ing of plea­sure and sat­is­fac­tion from the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing the pierc­ing itself. For oth­ers (like me) it’s an exter­nal­i­sa­tion of some inter­nal men­tal process, or a reminder of some­thing con­sid­ered wor­thy of remembering.

The psy­chol­ogy behind body mod­i­fi­ca­tion fas­ci­nates me. Intu­itively, I can under­stand why some­one would want to wear an exter­nal­i­sa­tion of a sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence or atti­tude on their body. I strug­gle explain it in words though.

I think it goes some­thing like this: we (humans) seem to use our expres­sions of our emo­tional states both as a sig­nal to oth­ers in soci­ety (“I’m happy”, “I’m very angry”) as much as a feed­back mech­a­nism for our­selves. If you put on a happy face, before too long, you start to feel sort of happy. You can, to some extent, con­sciously con­trol your emo­tional state by exter­nal­is­ing a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what you want it to be.

I think the same wiring is at work with body mod­i­fi­ca­tions (at least for me). It’s a dra­matic and per­ma­nent (well, mostly) expres­sion of some­thing that would oth­er­wise be com­pletely inter­nal. It’s a mnemonic, a key to that expe­ri­ence, but also a sort of scar — a way of pre­sent­ing phys­i­cally that a change has occurred in one’s mind, that one con­sid­ers sig­nif­i­cant. (Or is it the other way ’round, that I want to induce such a sig­nif­i­cant inter­nal change, and the pierc­ing presents a way of exter­nal­is­ing that desired end-​state!? Huh!)

My other piec­ing (my left ear), was a gift from a close (and very awe­some) friend, years ago. It wasn’t ini­tially a mnemonic, or a rite of pas­sage — it was some­what more whim­si­cal, at least on face value — but it’s come to serve the same pur­pose. (Though, I won­der about the moti­va­tions of the per­son who got it for me at the time — was it a whim­si­cal choice for them, too, or did the act of get­ting me pierced have some sig­nif­i­cance? Huh!)

As for the clients — I decided I don’t care. The sort of peo­ple who are going to judge me on the basis of some pierc­ings aren’t the sort of peo­ple I want to be work­ing with any­way. I know my skills and abil­i­ties, and it’s other peo­ples’ loss if they want to judge me on the basis of a piercing.

Plus, it looks cool. :P