My First Adult Decision
Joan Didion said that once she has her first line, she has her story. “Everything else is going to flow from that first sentence,” she told The Paris Review in 1978. This echoes real life in that every decision you make sets you up for the next one. Except when you begin building your life, writing your story in this analogy, you have no idea what’s going to come next, and only when, one day, you take the time to look back do you see how it’s all connected.
The first decision I made as an adult (technically) was to pierce my nose. It was 2006, a few weeks past my eighteenth birthday, and my parents had just left me in my dorm at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Halfway through the semester, I would miss them, but in those first minutes after they left I shook with excitement.
I looked around my room, which I was sharing for the summer with a whiny-voiced stranger from a foreign-to-me small town. All of my belongings — clothes, shoes, shower caddy, microwave, mini-fridge — fit together like a puzzle. I sat down on my bed and put my head between my knees for a second to contain a squeal. Then, I laid back and called my friend, Cory. I didn’t have my car, but Cory had hers. “Yes, they’re gone!” I screeched. “Come pick me up. We can eat — then go get my nose pierced.”
I was no less elated when I sat down in the chair at the piercing parlor. An apprentice would do my piercing, if that was alright, the manager explained. He was a bald guy with olive skin and two metal balls protruding from his smooth cheeks. That was fine with me. I was eighteen, therefore nothing could go wrong. He stood over the apprentice while she guided the needle and threaded something called a “nostril screw” into the hole. I bled a little bit more than the average person, he said, after it was all over, but it looked great. I loved it.
I told my parents a few weeks later. My Dad thought it was hilarious. My mom told me I’d work at Kmart for the rest of my life if I didn’t take it out. For the record, I don’t work at Kmart and I will never take my nose ring out. Ever. My nose ring is my first sentence.
Science says late adolescence is the time when children begin to rebel against their parents’ beliefs to assert their independence. Piercings often fall into that category. But my longing to stick a needle through the springy cartilage of my nose really wasn’t about rebellion (although pre-college, my mom was the only thing standing in the way). It was about vanity, which I should be ashamed to admit, maybe. But I mean that it was about how I saw myself and how I wanted the world to see me.
I was a formidable teenager. Not in the sense that I scared people or was all that strong (I still don’t; I’m still not), but I was intense. This was the mid-2000s, the era of MySpace. The things I hated, like school, the bitchy girls and seafood, I fucking hated. The things I loved, like MySpace, cheap booze and Harry Potter, I loved with the devotion of a deluded half-brain.
One time in the middle of AP calculus, my teacher pulled me aside and marched me outside. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. “But, like, what about class?” I gave him my best Disgruntled Teenager Face. He had stopped mid-sentence, in the middle of a lesson that I wasn’t even interrupting to make me … take a walk. “Yes,” he said, and walked away. So I followed him.
“What’s wrong with you? I mean, why do you have to be so nasty?” he asked.
My response was something like: “It’s not my fault everyone here sucks, and no one recognizes that reality except for me.” I probably—no definitely—smoked a cigarette in the parking lot later that day.
In short, I was your average teenager. I knew everything, everyone was bullshit and if I could just escape my suffocating hometown outside Tampa, Fla., and get my nose pierced then all barriers would fall away. My life would flower into a scene from an Urban Outfitter’s catalogue. I could escape. I wanted to pierce my nose almost as much as I wanted to be twenty-one.
I have only a vague idea of what I thought this might say about me during that time. I must have picked up from movies or MTV or MySpace that a piercing would signal I was interesting or rebellious (even if I was not rebellious enough to pierce my nose before I left my mother’s house.) And okay, yes, it probably had a lot to do with impressing my interestingness upon the opposite sex. And okay, yes, it was pathetic. But these days, I see my nose ring as a defining accoutrement, one that’s becoming ever more a part of how I see myself as each day passes.
I changed my major to journalism, for example, when I realized lawyers working at firms in D.C. don’t have facial piercings. I didn’t want to grow up. More recently, as I swim in anxiety about where my life is going and what my next sentence is going to be, I’ve taken to daydreaming about careers other than writer. Careers that might be meaningful in an immediate way, like politician or public health worker, and the question is always: Would I have to take my nose ring out? Does that make me shallow?
How you look matters, for better or worse. That’s why all those studies show attractive people make more money and have higher self-esteem. And style matters, too. I once found myself at an event for work that Lisa Ling was hosting. When she was introduced, I took notice of her six-inch heels, shiny straight hair and thick, expensive-looking sheath dress. I don’t ever want to dress like that I thought. And then I realized broadcast journalism, along with any other high-powered “running in heels” type job, was not in my future. No thanks.
When I pierced my nose, it was just a thing that I did because I was playing with the idea of myself as someone other than who I was in Tampa: the band geek who got her braces off and all she got was this nasty attitude. Now, I’m playing with the idea of I don’t know what. I don’t know who I’ll be next, but I know it’s going to all flow from who I am now. And I know, when I do decide, I’ll remember to look back and consider where it came from.
