hiddenmuse | The rest of the piercing story

If I'm totally honest, I think close to half of the piercings that I've had done were done in the name of alleviating severe frustration or dealing with grief in my own way.

There's a part of me that almost likes the pain - not enough that I get something pierced right after one thing has healed. (Okay, for a while it was like that...) For me, that initial pain is kind of a good pain. Like I can almost understand what someone means when they talk about a submissive going into their
headspace, where you just focus on that one thing and "nothing else around you matters".

People may think I'm weird for having the piercings - but being a total wimp about needles, and finding that allergy shot needles (which are probably like 20something gauge - really small) hurt like hell. (To use another BDSM reference - for a person who wants to be whipped and gets off on that pain; they don't get off on the "everyday pain" of stubbing their toe.)

Now, for the stuff that I'd labelled as being possibly trigger-y: Years ago, when I was on Paxil - it really fucked with my moods. The drug started out making me feel manic, which was kind of fun at first; when it got to be too much for me, I went off the meds ... of course when I crashed, I went back on the medication only to end up feeling emotionally bludgeoned. To compensate for feeling so numb, I started injuring myself. Mine wasn't the "standard" cutting - for me, it was scratching myself until I bled, and then usually doing things to keep from healing: kind of the picking at scabs, and rubbing tea tree oil into the wound - which hurt, but reminded me that I did feel *something*

I stopped self-injuring well over a few years ago, but I do have times where that temptation arises and I have to try and work through them. Even if it's meant something as extreme as stepping out of the kitchen in the middle of cooking dinner because the temptation was getting to be too great.

But yeah - this time, my piercing was for my birthday (yay for 38 years on this planet!) and also an outlet for a ridiculous amount of frustration: being put on a 3rd medication for my seizures, a co-worker pretty much suddenly going on medical leave, and idiot clients that don't seem to know how to pay their damn bills.