Piercing Reality

Two weeks ago I went to get my ears pierced. To clarify, this was to be my second ear piercing (now I have two holes on each lobe). I had wanted to do this for a long time, years even, but my complete and utter fear of physical pain always stopped me. When I was much younger I used to fashion myself as someone who, perhaps like a Buddhist monk, was able to detach their mind from the pain of their body. I thought—with a certain cockiness—that I could overcome anything with my mind. Yet time has stripped me of any false pretenses. I have now fully embraced my inner coward and quake at the thought of any physical pain, from paper cuts to dental operations to piercings.

You might be asking why I put myself through this anxious ordeal to do something completely unnecessary and purely aesthetic (plus, it isn’t even medieval!), and I asked myself the same question. I am a generally anxious and fearful person, but I constantly strive against these hindering qualities: I like to prove to myself that I can do things despite my anxiety. Plus, there was something spiritual in it (I find a way to make everything spiritual somehow). After my first year of university I changed my hair, which (though composed of many individual hairs, of course) I declared to be one entity. One year, one physical marker of what I had lived. Consequently, after my second year I wanted to mark the occasion as well, this time with two piercings: two physical entities, two years. This, plus the idea of how ‘cool and edgy’ I would be—even though nowadays almost everyone has a double piercing—convinced me to coerce my most frank and unforgiving friend into accompanying me to the tattoo parlour, which, from a limited internet search, is the best place to get any sort of piercing.

Unsurprisingly, it did not hurt as much as I had feared. This was a probable outcome considering in my mind I had equated the pain to a serious maiming or perhaps even decapitation. Anticipation is always far worse than the actual event. However, in the moments after the piercing, as the bubbly, fast-talking tattoo artist was explaining to me the proper care for my piercing, I felt near to fainting. I indeed would have fainted if I hadn’t been instructed to lie back down and told that this was totally normal—something to do with the release of adrenaline after being in such a state of anxiety leading up to the piercing.

Scientifically caused or not, I couldn’t help but consider this a sign of my mental reaction to such a monumental occasion in my little life. I had overcome my fears and done something that none of my friends nor family thought I could do. The anticipation, the vacillation that had weighed upon me for years was released, and something fractured. My sense of my physical existence is always fragile at best, but suddenly any sort of grounding dissipated and left me in a liminal, floating state. It was as though I had pierced the film of my reality, and all those other realities that I know are constantly lurking nearby, waiting for me to slip into them, came rushing in. I was a visitor in this life, a sensation I had had a few times before but never this pointedly, and I was merely watching everything from a distance of a few feet.

At the same time, I felt like a more thoroughly-coloured-in version of myself. Past attributes that I found special and exciting came rushing back in full force: whereas lately I had been struggling to reawaken my inner empath, I found that with every person I passed I had the vivid sensation of assuming their life, taking it on as though I were putting on a coat. My head filled with visions of various patterns in which a life can play out—each so very different from my own—which rushed in and out of my mind as the people in my proximity shifted.

I continued on this sort of adrenaline-infused high for hours, to the extreme confusion and amusement of my friend. Yet this is a recurring pattern in my life, experiences lift the delicate veil of reality in a way that typically is only inspired by mind-altering intoxication. Certain atmospheres fill my head with dizziness more than wine, and certain experiences have the capability to tear holes in my reality.

I am dubious that my grip on reality has remained the same since then. Today was particularly startling—the place of imagination within me suddenly exploded and endless visions filled my mind. Any sense of ‘the normal’ faded and each interaction/sight only further solidified my sense that something was irreparably different.

I suppose it began in the early hours of the morning as darkness still slept over England, when I had a very close-frame dream in which I cut my friend’s hair (this reasonably occurred because I was set to trim my friend’s hair today). In the dream, I cut her hair, which touches the bottom of her rib cage, to the line of her eyebrows in one unfortunate little section. She screamed; the dream ended. I awoke confused—I was not nervous to cut her hair; I had cut my own for years.

The dream lingered in my mind as I groggily stepped out of bed and went to turn on my lights. I flicked the switch a few times, not comprehending at first that the power had gone out again. It was the second time it has happened this week, but I was just as surprised as ever. Light is something that we have come to take for granted in our modern age, integral to our perceptions of reality, yet it was gone. This cast an eeriness over the rest of my day, even when the power came back on two hours later. There are so many things I take for granted in my reality; what would happen if a different kind of light turned out, and everything suddenly shifted irrevocably?

My friend arrived at 9:00 for me to give my attempt at being Delilah. As mentioned, I was not worried, but after a few snips of the scissors, the separation began. The experience brings to mind what Elena Ferrante describes in her Neapolitan Novels as ‘dissolving boundaries’, in which the character Lila sees the edges of all things blur and melt until everything dissolves and any prior sense of reality is wholly eradicated. Here I was, in control of this physical part of someone else, and my actions would affect her appearance for the next few months as her hair took its time reacquiring length. The pressure was suddenly unbearable, and I let my shell do the work as I retreated to somewhere deep in my mind. I cannot explain why this sudden lose of reality overcame me so quickly, nor why I was helpless to stop it.

Needless to say, with my mind impaired I felt I did an awful job cutting her hair, mainly in that I cut it about an inch too short, lightly echoing my dream. I couldn’t help but focus on the parallel, and my confused mind began to wonder whether the dream was actually my reality and I had been given a second chance that I had likewise wasted for some inexplicable reason.

For the rest of the day, until the evening rose, I was filled with a lightheaded anxiety that pricked my body with an irritating restlessness. I spent the day at the library (oh, the joys of dissertation writing) and at various points in the day I had visions of spirits and mythical creatures and became certain of malicious spirits following me through the bookshelves. Will you let me write these things, lovely reader, and still swear to you that I am not insane? I would like to put forth that anyone can enter this other realm where reality has retreated and imagination reigns, it just takes a bit of letting go.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the strange liminal state until I returned home. My flatmates and I fell into relaxed, happy conversation, and I described my visions of the day to much comedic effect. All was well even if my sense of reality remained dubious, until we were plunged into sudden darkness. This blackout lasted only about four minutes, but it was enough to thoroughly dislodge my conception of life for the day. There is something about sudden darkness that brings about deep shifts in the consciousness, suddenly being forced to look inward rather than outward, suddenly forced to consider what is a given and what is a gift.

So here I sit at the end of a long day, trying to unwind my mind and get some sleep. I wonder if any of you likewise have these days where you can let your sense of reality slip away and peek through to the innumerable alternate realities we all have access to. I truly enjoy these days; they are when I feel the most insecure, the most anxious, but also the most closely aware of my state of being. I am sure that in a past life I was a medieval mystic who was blessed with vivid visions from God, and these visions have lingered into this life and transformed to parallel my joys of the mythical world and the past. But until I can confirm this theory, I’ll just keep watching when the veil lifts and all the other realities rush in…