Piercings

Probably everyone who reads this blog also knows about my struggles with my earlobes even off this blog.  I am about to take a couple of photos of the organs concerned.  They will be blurry and speckly and not very good.
 Well, maybe just one:

This picture has made me happy, incidentally, bearing in mind that it was taken at 9:27 pm and I got up at 7 am.  However, I want to focus on the earlobe for now, or rather, what's been done to it.

This has four aspects for me.  Actually it has a lot more, but never mind.

Firstly, it's a piercing, something I declared repeatedly that I would never, ever do.  Not ever, never in a million years, never ever.  It was in fact one of those things which I was blocked from doing by that massive tangle of neuroses I used to use to structure my life and cope with stuff.  I once made an observation to my time twin Kate that I couldn't stand the idea of having a piece of metal sticking through a body part and she said that was precisely the appeal.

Secondly, it's an easy way of feminising one's appearance - thank you Organisedpauper for the suggestion. Of course, the precise nature of the thing sticking through it is a factor here.

Thirdly, it's a dummy run.  The prospect of maintaining a rather larger and more intimate body modification is surely contingent on my ability to maintain this much minor and more public one.  If I can't even do this, there's probably no point in bothering with the other.

Fourthly, it's a dummy run.  The response of my skin to this minuscule insult might give some indication to what would happen with the rather major procedure alluded to above.  For instance, if there's any skin shrinkage with this, there will be with the other.  Another clue to this could be found here:

For some reason, these have only healed with scarring - I suspect lack of vascularisation.  There's also shrinkage.

Going back to the piercing=penetration equation, I should insert a trigger warning here for my erstwhile phobia.
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OK with that?  Ready?
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Right then.
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Right, buttons!  A button is a small(ish) solid object penetrating a - well, I hesitate to say "hole" here, but penetrating material through an orifice whose function includes that.  There is of course something else which works that way, and that is possibly why I couldn't "go there".  In a way, and this would have made me climb the walls back in 2012, an earring is like having an earlobe button, and an earstud even more so.  I find it vertiginously weird that I can hold that thought in my mind without wanting to cut my earlobes off because of what Chloe did to them, but I don't.

A whole load of thoughts are swimming to the surface now which I really want to share.  I shared them elsewhere on Monday, but I can't do that here.  I just can't, sorry.  This thing is no respecter of what's considered taboo or totemic in any society, and it will plonk its monuments and clues where it will.  It doesn't care about embarrassment or inconvenience.  It just plonks its claims down arbitrarily and leaves the poor blighter to cope with them as she best sees possible.  In fact, not even that.  It makes its mysterious symbolic circumlocutions and leaves her to it to work out what the hell has happened.

You may think I play games, and I do of course, although I try not to, but believe me, the games my subconscious plays with me makes those games trivial by comparison, or some such cliche.

It's "out there" now, written in my NHS records, that thing I used to do, the Problem, and with luck it will be seen for what it is, a huge great pink flashing neon arrow pointing at my brain saying "THIS IS A WOMAN" to whom it may concern.  And I have to go back in March and talk about that, that deeply intimate, innermost circle thing about me, that cringe-making ultimate embarrassment which has made my life seem like a cruel divine joke sometimes, which meant I ended up learning about myself by reading something on a toilet wall in 1996 rather than in any kind of appropriate, caring or tender context, because guess what?  I am this person and this person is female, and one of the best ways of providing the evidence for that is to tell them about it, because the subconscious does not lie, not in that way.

But it doesn't suck to be me.  I have a sense of humour about it, the alternative being to jump off Beachy Head, and although it seems like a divine joke, it is actually quite a funny one when it comes down to it.

Sometimes a piercing is just a piercing.  Not on this occasion though.

Let me see if I can remember.  OK:  Debbie, Susie, Bettina, Mike, Rachel, Liz, Lou, Jonathan, David, Wayne, Rebecca, Katharine - thanks for understanding and accepting me.  It's a bigger thing for me than it is for you I expect - no pun intended.  I have to live with it, so I just hope it serves a purpose now.  I think I've mentioned you all.