Am I Too Old for a Septum Piercing?
A fan of piercings my whole life, I had several of them when I was younger: my tongue, the side of my lip, an inverted labret piercing, as well as ahem…a naughtier one. Over the years I took them out one by one until only the one naturally covered up by clothes remained, even finally let go of even that one last winter.
After taking a work study job in in college that required me to work with kids, the tongue ring and the lip rings were the first to go first. Looking back, I realized I never was explicitly asked to do this, maybe it was my desire to somehow give off a more professional vibe, but something in me silently nagged that I was “getting older” and should act accordingly, despite only being 22. Besides that, I was a theater major at the time, still holding on to half-ass dreams of stardom or at least a career in theater, I knew that piercings and tattoos wouldn’t give me the ability to blend in like that an actor needs.
Still, I love the body modifications look on the human body and consider them akin to decoration. As a compromise, I silently made pacts to myself that maybe I could get tattoos on parts of my body that could be naturally covered up, or that I could start tattooing myself more heavily around 40. But as I got older, those caveats felt silly to me. I wanted to live my life more for the here and now, and not worry so much about maintaining a certain image in anticipation of what could possibly happen.
A few years ago when the piercing was quite possibly at it’s height, I got my septum pierced. Still working as a teacher at the time my then-employer didn’t care for it much, naturally. I was determined not to take it out as I didn’t like the job much and there were a host of problems with them from jump (on their part) anyway. I compromised by flipping it up during classes so as the precious students they claimed they wanted to expose to Western culture wouldn’t be shell-shocked.
Ultimately, I ended up taking it out after a few months not just because of the job but also because the first piercer flubbed it, piercing it too high, and since I was flipping it up for work, it wasn’t healing properly. Every so often I’d think of getting it again, never bothering to take the plunge. I also wondered if at 31, I had missed the boat for such prominent facial piercings?
This past year though, was like a reckoning in my life. I had done everything I was supposed to do, and things were still falling apart. I was tired of conforming and not getting the results I wanted. This past October, I decided to do things more “my way” and I thought to myself, Why should my look be any exception? Who made up all these arbitrary rules about what a person can or can not do, or should or shouldn’t wear depending on age, race, gender, or whatever else. And more importantly, why was I trying to live my life by a set of rules in a game I don’t even want to play?
I made the decision to get my septum pierced again, because, well, I wanted to. Unlike most of my tattoos which I just have because I think they were pretty or cool, I see this piercing a little differently, it reminds me to not care so much about what the world sees me as and that I always have the freedom to live life on my own terms.
