Obligatory First Post

When I was eighteen years old, I had a second piercing put into my right earlobe. It was nothing extreme; it wasn't even gauged. I just liked the slight unevenness of it. Nobody thought much of it; indeed, my mother already had an extra piercing in each of her earlobes.

When I was twenty-one years old, I went to a broadcast for youth and young adults, to hear the Mormon prophet Gordon B Hinckley speak. Up until that day, I hadn't been particularly happy to be a member of the Mormon church, but neither had I felt disturbed to be so. It was all I knew. The questions were there, but they were infant ideas. They had not yet grown words.

I remember only one piece of counsel from that broadcast: that women should have only one earring per ear. One modest earring, whatever that meant. And there I sat, with my ears totaling two and my earrings totaling three. I had just been given a direct order from, as far as I knew, the Prophet of God. I had thought, in such a situation, that my course of action would be obvious. But sitting there in that stuffy chapel on that butt-numbing bench, with the Prophet's face ten feet tall before me, I knew that I was not going to obey.

There was no anger in that moment, no bitterness or resentment. There was just the calm, sure knowledge that nobody, not even a Prophet, had any business mucking about in my jewelry box! It was such a small thing, but for the first time ever, the LDS Church had attempted to cross a boundary in my mind, and found that boundary defended. My jewelry was an expression of my personality. Years of being bullied at school as a geeky bookworm had instilled in me a stolid determination that I would not change my personality, my self, for anyone but me. My jewelry was not loud or edgy, but it was part of my self and, to some degree, I wore it in defiance of those who would have taken that away. Though I may not yet have understood the depth of the LDS Church's failings, I knew bullying when I saw it.

I did not take out that third earring. My mother took her extras out that evening. Every other woman I knew took out any extra piercings she had. But I did not. That one extra earring went from a sparkly whim to an act of defiance. I would not take it out. I was defying the Prophet. I didn't fully understand why, but it was terribly important that I keep it up.

I still have that third piercing. There were times when I went for months without wearing any jewelry at all; I was hit by a near-crippling dose of clinical depression not long after that broadcast, and I quit caring how I looked for a while. A few times during the years that followed, that third piercing closed up and began to heal over. Whenever I caught it doing that, I would pick up any old earring and shove it through the hole. Sometimes I relished the pain but mostly it was an annoyance. But it was a sign of my ownership of myself, so it had to stay, pain or no pain.

So,  if you're reading this, welcome to my PostMormon blog, and I hope my choice of name makes at least a bit of sense to you.