I said I would, and I did. I am now punctured and proudly pierced; my recent transition across the invisible line, turning over a half-century, felt significant enough to make me want to visibly mark it.

This is a serious initiation. I wanted to make a statement about my commitment to wandering my fey path. I’m all in favour of alternatives to the so-called ‘norm’. So I now sport a rather large magenta nose-ring. This means I can no longer be mistaken for an ordinary middle-aged woman. Hallelujah! Why on earth should I want to? I am anything but ordinary.

I am a crazy poet, drummer, singer-songwriter, goddess-loving, tribalist, astrologer, psychic, artist, reader-of-oracles, wild dancer, yes! I don’t have to pass for normal, and no further desire to pretend that I want to. I did, once. I originally pretended for my very-conservative childrens’ sake, but they’re not children anymore, are they? Besides, the wisdom of denying my ownself ‘for them’ was always questionable.

And now I’m all grown up. As a hobbit I’ve come of age, and I chose to nose-pierce to mark my passage. I might have tried tattooing, but tatts are expensive and I had a barter going with Amber.

Amber, my flesh-puncturing friend, used a monstrously large hollow needle, of the approximate thickness of a toilet plunger. The logic was that if you made the hole a bit bigger than the object occupying it, it would be more comfortable to install. Sure. Why not? The hollowness of the needle made sense too. I could see that it would punch out a thin plug of, well, me, leaving a neat hole, which makes proper engineering sense to my mechanical brain. I can spare that little bit of me; I bleed out more of myself than that every month. No biggie.

Then she asked, “Will seeing the needles bother you?”

I said, “Nope,” and was well-impressed to find it was so, more or less. With a device that resembled a cross between vise grips and kitchen tongs she clamped my nostril flat, the pain of which distracted me from what was going to happen next. When it actually happened, though, it occupied every iota of my consciousness, be assured. Amber gripped the ginormous rod in a pair of tongs (reminiscent of a blacksmith plucking a heated bar of iron from the fire), plunged it through my flattened and stretched flesh, and oh my, did I holler.

It was a big improvement over the time I was fourteen and my stepsister poked my earlobes repeatedly with a dullish darning needle, an ice cube and a dime, trying with eventual success to force her way through the cartilage.

This is powerful magic. I am now initiated. The moment of piercing lit up my whole world. My hollering was the sore-throated rawness of a woman giving birth, appropriate in light of the fact that during three births, I remained unnaturally silent. Once it seemed a virtue to be stoic, but it’s so much more FUN to yell. I didn’t wriggle or flinch, I just opened my mouth and let molten sound, stream out, pure raw energy in motion.

I was never a screamer, but I am now. I held back then. I’m not holding back anymore.

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