Lobe and behold...

Piercings and identity.

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On her visit to South Africa, I had to remove my girlfriend’s helix piercing (I had to google it too, it’s that one sort of three-quarters up the curve of your ear on the outside). After relative discomfort ever since getting it two or so years earlier, it finally became infected on her visit. I removed the metal and tended to her ear. In addition to that piercing, she also has two in each earlobe, a relatively common sighting in Berlin. In fact, it feels like about half of the people I sit across on the train have piercings somewhere, regardless of class, nationality or sex. Earlobes are still the most common, with septum as the runner-up. About once a week I’ll see an eyebrow or lip piercing. On the train last week a woman about my age sat across from me. She wore a black tank top, a cropped, blonde bob and a frown. The middle of her bottom lip was pierced with a silver ring. Perhaps it was the frown or the inherently un-chatty climate present in any U-Bahn in Berlin, but I felt like the lip ring made her look a little more menacing than the average passenger. Reading my thoughts, I’m sure, she then promptly flashed a wide and gracious smile at a homeless man as she added a few coins to his extended paper cup. The genuine care I saw on her face immediately shattered the assumptions I had projected onto her because of the jewellery she had chosen to wear.

Shortly before my twenty-first birthday, I had my left earlobe pierced. As a kid and teen, I was always a bit of a straight shooter; I wore a sweater vest to school in winter. I never would have imagined, back then, that I’d be touting any kind ofpiercing. Three years in design school must have done something to me, because on one of the last Saturdays in my university career, a good friend of mine drove me to the tattoo studio that had done his ears and ten minutes and one waiver later, I had a small silver stud in my ear. I would have preferred a silver hoop, but only had the presence of mind to ask for it once the initial piercing was already in and fiddling about with a freshly bloodied ear is not recommended, apparently.

A week or two later, my mom and I held a big, joint twenty-first-and-fiftieth birthday bash (her birthday is five days after mine) with all the family on both sides and a good few friends as well. I couldn’t wait to unveil my new piercing and shock the family that this straight shooter had turned punk rock! (Or indie rock, maybe?) I would say that the reaction to my radical new style was underwhelming, but that would imply that there was any reaction at all. Not one of the two dozen partygoers said a peep! After hugging him hello and passing by him several times as I carried food from the kitchen to the patio, I corned my grandfather and asked him if he saw anything different about me. A fellow type-A, I expected a tongue-in-cheek ‘Is this what it’s come to?’ or perhaps a headhung in mock disapproval at the crazy things kids do these days. His love never wavering, of course.

I did not get what I wanted. After incorrectly guessing that I had shaved my beard or grown a moustache, I finally pointed at my ear. He leaned forward and squinted and asked if it was real. “Yes!” I said. He leaned back and blinked. “It’s very nicely done,” he said. Is that it? I thought. I’ve gone and overturned everything! I’ve swapped collared shirts for Hawaiian print, long curls and an earring! (I told you I was type-A). Clearly, my piercing wasn’t as shocking a statement to my family as it was to me. Perhaps they had asked themselves why it had taken so long, after leaving coding for design, for me to finally get the earring. I joke about coding, but I can say with confidence that without having befriended this particular young man at university; without bonding with him over comics and trail running; without visiting his home and rewiring his speakers so that we could listen to his Springsteen vinyl; without sitting in my thirty-year-old hatchback (that he hardly fit in, at almost two metres tall) in the baking sun with the windows rolled down, talking about girls and film cameras and legacy and running shoes; without him teaching me how to stand-up-paddle; without the two of us writing and shooting a short film together, I never would have gotten my ears pierced. I never would have thought that people like me got their ears pierced. But he was a little like me. And I wanted to be a little like him, so in the silver stud went.

I don’t wear my earring anymore. After having it in for the last little stretch of university and my first couple jobs afterwards, and my time working as a camp counsellor in New York State and while falling for my girlfriend, and while making the move to Germany, I decided to take it out after living in Berlin for a few months. It began to feel like the earring said something else here. I didn’t feel like it connected me with my good friend anymore or to our shared passions or to our history or the feelings I felt as a young man in Stellenbosch. I felt like every other person in Berlin, like every other Berliner. I didn’t feel like I was like everyone else here, so I didn’t want to look like them. I judged that woman for wearing her lip ring, wondered why she’d felt like she needed to express her identity in that way. But then that’s exactly why I took my earring out, because of how I chose, and continue to choose, to express my identity. And I didn’t smile at the homeless man at all…

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The earring I wore the most was a gold-plated one I bought on the West Coast of Ireland while a couple of friends and I were on a road trip from one end of the island to another. Months later the gold plating wore off and I finally bought myself the original silver hoop I wanted. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.