Twinkling My Roar

I’ve been threatening for awhile to pierce my nose. I realize that sounds as if I’ve been standing in my condo with wild eyes and spittle on my chin, brandishing a safety pin, yelling, “Stand back! I’m gonna do it!”

I was supposed to get my nose pierced a couple of months ago (don’t worry: by a pro). But then in a serenely level-headed moment, I went to a hobby store instead and found glue-on face jewels for $6. I figured it was easier than committing to a hole in my face. I glued one on, took a picture, and sent it to my boyfriend, whose immediate response was: “Cool!” Better than “Hmm,” so that was encouraging.

I’ve already done my due diligence. I read some blogs by people who’d pierced their noses and then felt moved to warn others about all the things they didn’t expect, like how it hurts a lot…and keeping it clean until it heals feels like a full-time job, or torture (which is kind of the same thing)…and, disturbingly, how snot builds up if you get the L-shaped post. I didn’t think nose-piercing was any more traumatizing or maintenance-intensive than ear-piercing, but apparently I was wrong.

Still, I have a pretty high pain threshold. And keeping it clean isn’t so bad when you know there’s a good reason for doing it. Once the wound heals, you can taper off the frequency of the cleaning anyway. And while I admit the snot build-up sounds gross, it seems like I could go with a straight post shaped more like an earring, which would hopefully mitigate that problem.

I have real people in my life who’ve done it. My friend Andrea, for example, who pierced her nose twenty years ago; she eventually replaced the stud with a hoop she got in Turkey, which sounds like the kind of Bohemian Bad-Ass story I want to tell: “Oh, this little thing? I got it in a souk in Morocco when I was doing a camel trek through the Sahara.” My friend Rachael pierced her nose after college. And my sister pierced hers in college before anyone else was doing it.

In fact, the preferred body decoration back then was either a tattoo or a navel piercing. I decided against a tattoo when a girl in one of my classes walked in one day and proudly showed everyone the tiger tattooed across her stomach, and all I could think about was how that tiger would st-r-e-e-e-e-t-ch if she ever got pregnant, after which it would deflate into some kind of unidentifiable Rorschach blot, and was that the look she was going for in her moment of (possibly drunk) abandon. I was further validated in not getting a tattoo when a girl I later worked with spent lots of money trying to remove a tiger the length of her calf (tigers must have been the decoration du jour for drunken abandon in the late ’90s), after which her lasered skin would ooze for hours through her business-casual slacks. I guess the permanence—or near-permanence—of tattoos never appealed to me.

My college boyfriend and I thought it would be a good idea to get our belly buttons pierced as a kind of look-at-us-aren’t-we-so-cool bonding experience, but when it came down to it and the guy at the shop showed us the needle he used for such occasions, we hightailed it out of there—without shame, I might add. Some things you just don’t feel bad about not having the guts to do.

But lately I’ve been feeling my guts. I’ve been feeling there is still much to be experienced. I’ve also been thinking that with the world the way it is and the current of dystopian emotional sludge we can all feel and the pressing urge to make it all better while wondering if it will ever really be better again, I understand the singular, sweet relief that self-inflicted pain can bring.

What it comes down to is that I do want the hole in my face. Or, rather, what I want is the temporary pain that comes with a temporary decoration that temporarily alters my appearance in a way that makes me feel like I have free agency again. Free agency to rise up, collect myself, and find the seed of “good” in the world, to find my rightful place, my sphere of influence, to discover my contribution.

The same free agency I feel when I wear my Mother of Dragons t-shirt.

Because while I may be a woman-hear-me-roar on the inside (most of the time, not counting the days when I have no idea what the hell I’m doing), my fear is that I’ve reached a point where that roaring woman is no longer obvious on the outside, at least to the average person I may encounter. I spend 80% of my time wearing workout clothes and no make-up and giving myself errands to run so I can have an excuse to leave my home—which is also my workplace. I drive a Volvo and put stevia in my coffee. I go to bed at 9 pm, for Christ’s sake. There’s no roaring going on here.

I’m also unlikely to expose my inner true colors until we’ve had that rare, Avatar-esque, “I see you” interaction—which only seems to happen in the deep playa at Burning Man or at indie coffee shops with exceptionally chatty watercolor painters wandering by. So if you don’t happen to unearth my roar through layers of rock and fossil on the unending archaeological dig that is “getting to know me,” then it comes down to this: I need to show it. Make it obvious. Make it twinkle, gosh darn it.

While a nose piercing is nothing original at this point, it’s something I know I could do—stone-cold sober, at that. I could try it out. I could let my eyes water for fifteen minutes and get the token bottle of saline solution and listen to the keeping-it-clean spiel. I could even deal with the snot build-up (I think).

I could feel that twinge of nerve endings when I touch the stud. See the flash of crystal in my line of vision. I’d recall it as the time when I sought pain, on purpose, to remind myself of my own enduring alive-ness, and as the time when my inner guts needed to manifest outwardly. Maybe I’d say, “That was the time when, shortly after, I really did go on a camel trek through the Sahara, and then helped build a water-collection device in Peru, and then saved some oil-soaked wildlife, and then became an independent journalist for awhile and produced a documentary with Sebastian Junger. It was the time when I shook hands across the aisle and our protests made a difference and people started listening to each other and a vision began to be shared. Oh, and it was the time when I finally got my second novel published, and stopped wondering about being a freelance writer and whether or not I was living a pipe dream, and for once I found my contribution to the world and just settled into it and smiled.”

“It was the time,” I would say, “when things got better.”

And then I’d bump my nose in the middle of the night and wake up with a screech and remember I needed to buy more saline solution.

I don’t know. Some roar like that.