Ear Piercing Masochism

@Nathan Oski

I got another piercing last week after almost two years, making it my eighth piercing. It’s another cartilage piercing, but this time more in the middle of my ear instead of at the top. The piercer told me not to sleep on it for six months, but I’ve already been turning onto my right side half-asleep and waking up with a minor pain in my ear. Twenty-four hours after I first got it, my curly hair had already pulled on my earring and had been caught by the strings of my mask. I liked that soreness though. 

Unlike the unruly cramps I get when I’m on my period, this is a pain I have chosen. The sensitivity surrounding my tattoo the week after I got it and the mild throbbing from creating a hole in my ear are pains that show the autonomy I have over my body. 

In so many ways, being a collegiate woman means dealing with your body when you don’t have complete control over it. The student who counts her calories because her body is expected to look a certain way and be a certain size, the student whose hormones have begun to clash and collide because of the change in her birth control — a burden she holds so that she and her boyfriend can have sex without a pregnancy — and the student curled up in bed, fighting off waves of nausea from the Plan B pill she took. All of us.

Sometimes it feels like my relationship with my body is parasitic: I am constantly having to aid it, to give. Other times, it feels like my own biology has allied with societal pressures to make my body feel even less in my control. 

Your body says, “This has to happen. You have to bleed and you have to ovulate and your metabolism has to slow down.” 

And society has responded, “We can make money off of this.” 

But I decide the pain of a change. The soreness from my new piercing is a different kind of pain. It’s a reminder that though my body controls my life in many ways, there are ways for me to control my body, too. After all, it is my body. When I used to walk to campus during my freshman year, I would listen to the audiobook Ruin and Rising. I came across a line that perfectly encapsulated the point I am trying to get across now. When the protagonist shamed another character for getting a tattoo, the other character responded, “I have a lot of scars; this is one I chose.” 

That’s how I explain paying a woman to poke a hole in my ear: this is a scar I chose. When I kneel to tie my shoes and catch a glimpse of my tattoo on my ankle, I am reminded that though it often doesn’t feel like it, I am in charge of my own body. I can make the decisions that affect it. It’s a useful reminder when you’re twenty years old.

By Lindsey Staub

Junior at UC Berkeley, studying English and history. Lover of sweet lattes, sheepdogs, and the color pink.

Note: Cover image by @kimzifi