The spontaneous decision to have my tongue pierced at the age of 20 was mostly rewarding. For about the first two weeks I was not able to eat anything solid without excruciating pain, I had cold sores all over my tongue caused by my brain as it didn’t like foreign objects within muscles and sounded slightly inebriated due to the initial slurring. Besides all that, I had immense fun with it and it made piercing skin seem somewhat arbitrary (extremities excluded). I staved off boredom in seminars and meetings by visibly playing with the barbell. Kissing was fantastic partly due to the twisting and turning of the barbell and the kissed playing with the tips of it (I also had a silicone clip-on that made things even more interesting). Moreover I felt slightly different to the rest of the crowd since it was not incredibly common for men (especially Afrikaans men) to have their tongue pierced at the time.

I had a 16mm gauge titanium barbell of which I replaced the top screw-on ball a.k.a. spare with a plastic one. I’m sure the reason for this is fairly obvious- now and again you bite it by accident. Unfortunately, the regular occurrence of boredom caused me to subconsciously yet purposefully chew the spare until it inevitably broke. This sucked because the barbell had to be removed completely which is uncomfortable if you’ve had it in your mouth for a little more than two years. I began running through spares like chewing gum (which was part of the problem) and eventually decided to put back the titanium spare to stop me from chewing it. It worked well for quite some time until one New Year’s Eve of complete and utter intoxication where I finally broke one of my teeth. Titanium: 1 – Enamel: 0. Spitting out chunks of teeth is a sobering and rather unpleasant experience. This slightly gruesome incident led me to realize that I value my teeth more than risking losing them by keeping the piercing, but as a whole the experience was great and I’m glad I did it.

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