I had a boyfriend who didn’t want me to model, so I didn't for a very long time. He and I eventually broke up, and around that same time I was watching my mother die of cancer. She died very young with many things unfinished and so many things she had wanted to do. I thought fuck it, the time is now, I need to just get on with this. My mother always pushed me to go for what I wanted, even if she didn’t agree with it.

He told me I looked sexy covered in his blood, I agreed and hit him a few more times until he turned his head and I connected with the side of his skull. I felt my hand break and I got even more pissed off, so started kicking him. I didn’t stop until someone jumped in and stopped the fight. When we were done it looked like a murder scene.

I kept the blood-stained white tank top I had been wearing as a trophy. I wanted to write something on it, and one night it hit me: “BELLA VENDETTA”

It’s Italian for Beautiful Revenge.

Bella Vendetta became a good response to a lot of things after that. I wanted revenge for everything— for our society, our country, our culture. I wanted revenge from every magazine or website that’s rejected my pictures because they were too racy. I wanted revenge and I wanted it to be beautiful.

If I was able to pay models I think it’d make more people want to pose, but I don’t want anybody whose sole reason for posing is to make money. Anyone whose first question is “how much are you paying” is someone that probably won’t fit well into the site. My main concern with money right now is making back what I put into getting the site up. Once that happens I hope to make a little bit of profit, but I’m not trying to get rich off taking advantage of anybody.

80s Trash: Roller-skates and prom dresses, leg warmers and cheap plastic jewelry.
Bathrooms: Public restrooms, bubble baths and shower scenes.
BDSM: Bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism and masochism.
Blood Sex: Play piercing, vampirism, and cutting. Currently all the blood play is real blood. Any sets involving special effects makeup or fake blood is in other categories.
Boots and Braces: Steel toes, suspenders, face smashing, shaved heads, white laces and bleached jeans.
Clowns: rubber chickens, face paint, clown shoes striped socks and big red noses.
Deprivation and Asphyxiation: Choking, strangulation, sensory deprivation of any kind, blindfolding and auto erotic asphyxiation.
Food: Food smearing licking, worshipping, insertion and cooking.
Foot Worship: Forced foot worship, foot portraits, cute toes, shoes, pedicures and foot bondage.
Genderfucking: Crossdressing, role playing, strap-ons, sissy boys in tutus and butchy women in suits.
Graveyards: Cemeteries, fucking gravestones and making imaginary love to the dead.
Menstrual art: This section is aimed to revolutionize menstruation. It's revenge for any commercial girls have seen telling them their period is dirty and for any man who wouldn't make love to them while they were on the rag.
Necro: Zombie porn, the undead, crime scene victims, sex where one partner plays dead and murder sets.
Pinups: Glamour shots, rockabilly kings and queens, classic beauty and cheesecake glam. Vintage girdles and nylons with backseams, fingerwaved hair and open toed pumps.
Smoking: Cigar, cigarette, blunt, joint, pipe, bong and gravity bong smoking.
Uniforms: Nazis, nurses, flight attendants, postal workers, military personnel, police officers, cheerleaders, waitresses and catholic school girl uniforms.
Water Sports: Golden showers, urination and women who can pee standing up.

After all was said and done I felt like I really just needed to finish what I started. I’m not the type of person that gives up, I was just having a moment of weakness. But I think it was important for me to step back and reevaluate why I was doing this and figure out the direction I wanted the project to take. It always seems like just when you want to give up everything falls into place and a fresh opportunity presents itself.

I don't think I can fully avoid being prosecuted. I have to be prepared for at least some legal repercussions, and luckily all of my legal paperwork is in perfect order. Maybe what this industry needs right now is someone willing to stand up for what they believe in. Who is the US government to tell us what we are allowed to find sexy and what is “obscene.” I find it obscene and offensive that so many other “alternative” porn sites are altering the shoots they have up for fear of legal problems. I want to accurately represent this subculture, not hide behind a lot of pretty pictures, not tell my models that it's wrong of them to have age play fantasies, etc. This is a community of consenting adults making art to share with the world, and I'll stand by that 100%.

Love the industry. Know as much as you can about the people, events and practices— anything that has to do with body modification.

Have an open mind at all times. Don’t be judgmental about anything body modification related. You don’t have to participate in it yourself, but you have to accept that other people may do it and it’s probably important to them.

Ask interesting questions. Don’t be afraid to push people’s limits.

Work independently and work hard. Shannon and Rachel work very hard on their responsibilities within BME, the last thing they want to do is to have to worry about whether or not their employees are doing their job. BME should be your life, just like it is theirs. Shannon and Rachel’s lives revolve around BME and have for over ten years, so they want people who will work just as hard as they do.

It was a lot harder to “step back” from my video-article because I specifically wrote it from my point of view as a first-time-Suscon-attendee. I went to the event hoping to capture the emotion and vulnerability that goes hand-in-hand with suspensions, and I think I accomplished that. I wanted to do a video of the day's events so the people who felt excluded (men, specifically) would feel better about the event and so they could get a feel for the atmosphere when it’s just women involved.

I also loved seeing the feedback in the forums after each article was published. The act of having my work published felt like an accomplishment alone, but to have people say such positive things about my work (on BME and on other sites) was really wonderful, in a completly narcissistic way. Any criticism I received allowed me to fix the things that needed it and made me work harder.

The reasons why I’m not more heavily modified are because I have a hard time committing to things, I’m a minimalist and I travel too much. I haven’t lived somewhere for longer than eight months since I was sixteen. I have never owned a cell phone or a car. I’ve broken every lease I’ve ever signed. I don’t currently own a plant, a table, a television or any of the other things that most people own, and I love it. If I can't even commit to those things, I certainly cannot commit to a tattoo or other major work.

Because I don’t spend a lot of time in one place makes it hard to find professionals that I can trust. I don’t want to be tattooed by a stranger and it’s hard for me to find symbols to put on my body that represent things in my life because I’m constantly changing.

My lifestyle requires a lot of money, so when I have it I’m more likely to spend it on plane tickets or other travelling expenses. The things I’m most proud of having in this world are my ticket stubs, my journals and my photographs.

Cere was the first and only person to react to my lack of experience and mods (at least to my face), but I expected it from him— and I was honestly glad that someone finally brought it up, because I knew he wasn’t the first person to think it. It was nice to have it out in the open.

I’d love to get a ribcage piece of a large baobab tree with a comma incorporated to represent the time I spent living and working in West Africa’s The Gambia.

I’ve nearly run out of places to pierce, but I love nape piercings and will probably get it done at some point.

My dream modification is to get my ears pointed, though I’m not sure if I’ll ever go through with it. I love the way it looks and I’ve got small ears and I think it’d suit me.

My only opinion that’s changed is about suspension. Before working for BME, I had no interest in suspension and basically no knowledge about it because of my complete lack of curiosity. After meeting Clive (of the Uvatiarru and one-hook, one-elbow suspension fame), things changed. I became more and more interested in it, and have basically decided that I’m going to do a suicide suspension the first chance I get. After seeing my first suspensions during BMEfest (most memorably the one by IAM:spot and IAM:brion), I was convinced it was something I’d like to do, and this need was increased when I went to this year’s All Grrls Suscon.

How did moving to and living in La Paz affect your internship experience? Furthermore, was this effect positive or negative?

One of the main reasons why Clive and I left Mexico early was because we wanted to move to the British Virgin Islands. Clive was born there and feels a strong connection to the island on which he was born, and I love anywhere that is hot and has the ocean, so it sounded like a good plan. We planned to stay in Canada until November and save some money, but because of some very cheap plane tickets, we flew down on August 30. We camped for a week and we’re currently renting a small apartment on the top of a mountain. We’d love to have visitors, so contact us if you're up for a trip!

Clive will be working at a day job while I focus on various web development work. (Shameless plug: if you're looking for a web designer, please contact me!)

My long term goals are to settle down a little bit. I’d love to own a sewing machine again and have a garden with peas and carrots. I want to have cats. I really want to live in a farmhouse somewhere near the ocean.

I don’t think any one place can really make you want to stop travelling. If anything, a terrible experience would make me want to stay in one spot for the rest of my life. Visiting different places makes me want to keep doing it— it never has the opposite effect. In the past six years I’ve lead a very full life.

I’ve seen volcanoes in Italy, visited fetish bars in France, gone shopping in London, lived amongst some of the poorest people in the world in West Africa, worked for billionaires in Florida and millionaires in Luxembourg, gone on countless road trips through the United States and Canada, smoked hash in Amsterdam, sunbathed on black sand beaches in Greece, and most recently, camped in the jungle in the British Virgin Islands… I never want to stop, but I’ll probably slow down. My lifestyle is often exhausting.

My adoptive parents let me in on the game reasonably early on in life but I was not supposed to tell anyone else of my alternative beginnings for fear of embarrassing them into an explanation. I played the game for a while but seeing no need to keep the information out of the public domain, I gave up and started telling people the truth about who I was and where I’d come from, as far as I knew it at the time. It was never an issue for me, it was a natural part of me and therefore was just another piece of information that friends always knew and never bothered with. I wasn’t ashamed of it — if anything, their fear made me more determined to find out who my biological mother really was.

According to some of the adoption literature out there, put two adopted boys in the same family together and they will both attempt to gain the acceptance and love of the adopted parents in polar opposite ways.

I was the one who excelled at everything he tried. School work was a breeze and I enjoyed the adulation I got for my work there. My brother, whom we picked up from an unfamiliar, crowded living room somewhere in Glasgow, Scotland when I was four years old, was the opposite. I was very academic; he was particularly inclined to working with his hands when he was growing up. Unfortunately that also included regularly stealing from family and strangers, breaking into cars and buildings and ended up with him being jailed for his part in an attempted armed robbery at nineteen years of age, under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Around the time of his sentencing, I was being lambasted by my adoptive parents for having already graduated from university with an Honours Degree in Business and Commerce and then choosing to further my education doing a Masters Degree in Clothing Studies and Textiles at a well-known Scottish textile college instead of getting “a real job.”

It’s hard to tell what motivated me to get where I am today, to take the path I have taken. Was I subconsciously going in the opposite direction of everything my adoptive parents told me to do or be, from the advice to get a job in the local bank and settle down to “take out all that shit from your face and never, ever get a tattoo,” just because I feared losing even more of my core identity or was it my only true choice no matter what?

If I were to be brutally honest, and after my adoptive parents kept from me for years that Evelyn had been trying to contact me, while calling me deceitful and secretive for searching for her by myself, I could say the same about them as I do my brother. We’ve been growing further apart for a long time and this last six years while I’ve been living and working in Venezuela, South Korea, Japan and now Australia, things have been quite bad emotionally.

I had been looking for my father as well, and made my first contact with him in September 2000 through his lawyer. I had sent out a reasonably vague letter asking for some family history help to the three people in the USA that had exactly the same name as him and that were listed in the White Pages Directory. While the two other men of the same name politely sent back a reply informing me that they were not the person I was looking for and wishing me luck, I got a short and succinct lawyer’s letter from this guy. I believed then that I had found my biological father. In the conversation between me and lawyer that followed it was put to me, amongst other things that his client was extremely uneasy at having a paternity suit filed against him.

Since then, in my attempt to prove paternity, I’ve come up against what looks like a paranoid, guarded, scared, suspicious and dishonest man. We eventually had a DNA test done. My blood was sent to the USA and tested by some facility, suggested by him thousands of miles from where he lived (even though there was a testing lab in the building where he gave his blood) and it came back negative. As soon as he opened the letter that legally granted him the immunity he appeared to want, he wrote me and wished me well. He has since pulled down the shutters, locked the gates and employed the heavies to keep me at bay.

So I happily continue on my journey with Evelyn and the rest of the family; my adoptive parents have decided that they can only go so far. I will soldier on for a while, shaking the tree to see what falls for me and dealing with it as it happens. I’m still quite excited about the whole thing and see it as a wonderful opportunity for me to further my emotional growth and delve deeper into the human psyche.

It was like electricity was flooding all my neurons at the same time, forcing me to take in all this new and exciting stimuli and all I could do was crave more and more of it. That trip awoke something deep inside me, a great fire-breathing travelling dragon. I stepped off that bus and into a new world, a world of things that I’d never experienced or seen before. That feeling has never left me and that’s why I spend most of my time travelling the world, seeing things and just being there. The earth-shattering banality of routine, doing the same thing over and over with the same people in the same place, just kills me from the inside out. Travelling gets me high.

Peru initially taught me, and many other places have since validated this fact, that when you come across people who have nothing or very little in life, according to our Western values of material gain and money equaling success, they are more willing to share what they have with you than rich people are. I remember standing in Cuzco town square at the big markets there, full of beautiful Peruvian textiles, materials and food and listening as a teenage backpacker was haggling with one of the indigenous Peruvian women over the cost of some alpaca products. The backpacker was from England and she was trying to get the woman to reduce the price from about seven soles to six soles, which is approximately $.30 US. To the Peruvian woman is it important that she gets as much as she can for her products, especially as she sits out there on the ground all night, every night. Never mind the fact that the backpacker has probably spent thousands of pounds on her trip already. I feel sick to the pit of my stomach every time I see this level of tightness when it comes to money and it always comes from the richer side of the divide. I wonder if it ever crossed her mind to pay the woman full price and maybe buy her dinner at the same time? All too often I see richer people trying to get more money out of poorer people (see current Western trade pacts and G8 meetings for more obvious global examples) and it gets quite upsetting at times. I really have no time for stingy people.

Going to Venezuela was a real eye-opener for me and not just for the obvious benefit of seeing so many beautiful looking girls on a daily basis. They really have the highest ratio of good looking females I’ve ever seen, but of course that’s only if you like South American women. I’m a sucker for them.

But on the other hand, my time in Venezuela was a bit of a nightmare. So many negative things happened to me there that I couldn’t take any more after seven months. All my stuff was stolen and I was left with a pair of shoes, a shirt and a few books; my boss stole money from me; my landlady stole money from me; her sons stole stuff from my room; I got very, very sick to the point of shitting a lot of blood and throwing up while the city had no water for three days; I lost money at the bank; my debts were getting bigger and bigger; two guys were killed across from my apartment block while trying to kidnap a local family; I got mugged at knifepoint; I saw guys getting their car stolen at gunpoint; I almost got kicked out of the country for being there illegally and getting involved with the owners of a hotel and their cocaine habit, and then when I tried to finally leave the country was paralyzed by flash floods that killed 60,000 people and made another 200,000 homeless (and those are conservative estimates). At the airport after I was eventually allowed to leave, I was strip searched and threatened with jail if I was found to have been working illegally and/or carrying drugs. Three hours and five pairs of soiled underpants later they finally let me fly out.

And this cements my point from before: that on the surface things might look bad, but deep down your learning and coping systems are taking it all in, storing it and using it for any future similar experiences you might have. I learnt so much from my time there. It taught me lots of useful things for the big bad world out there that I would never have learned if I’d stayed at home.

I think the most humbling one was that basically all of my stuff was stolen, and apart from being an incredibly frustrating and annoying time for me, it was just stuff. I had developed unhealthy attachments to it, I had kid myself on that it meant so much to me and I was devastated that it had been taken by someone else. It taught me that I was putting too much value on my stuff, on my material things. Attachment is the road towards greed. A long time passed though before I was truly able to think like that, but it was an extremely worthwhile thing to learn. Possibly one of the most important things I’ve ever learned in my life. I see too many people with too much stuff and to be honest, this human craving for more and more material goods makes me quite ill.

Japan’s lax drug enforcement meant that shops were able to sell things that you couldn’t buy legally in most other countries around the world. Research chemicals and mushrooms were widely available which made for more than a few amazing incidents while I was living there for three years. My Salvia Sequences, Mushroom Madness and 5-MeO-DMT façade-busting journeys would have been a lot harder to come by if it hadn’t been for those enlightened people selling these wonderful “gifts” amongst other things. The salvia divinorum plant expanded my thinking and became the focal point for the large stomach tattoo I got before I left and moved to Australia.

There are times when you curse certain aspects of this lifestyle: for example, not being able to spend a lot of money on decent consumer goods like computers or stereo systems because you know you’re going to be leaving in twelve months time; spending money sending everything you have, packed in boxes, to your new destination. I’ve moved countries five times in the last six years, so the cost of moving soon mounts up. Always being a few steps behind when you can’t speak the local language and as a consequence of this, always having to rely on the goodwill of other people to help you do stuff, like open bank accounts and connect telephones etc — this gets me down occasionally. All things considered, the positives far outweigh the negatives and that is something that I don’t want to stop.

I don’t feel worn out as such. As long as you approach these things in the right way then even though they can be frustrating at times, they blend into the more colourful bigger picture as just something that you need to be able to deal with, but then you get to see and do weird and wonderful things in strange and exciting new places at the same time — it’s a balancing act.

Maybe I’ll stop travelling in the future, maybe not. It’s funny because I often hear people telling me “you’re too old to live like that” or “you’ll regret not settling down one day.” I find these concepts quite bizarre — like there is some secret rule book for life that tells you how and when you can do certain things and by what time! Or people who know me better than myself and can see into the future, giving me the benefit of their wisdom. These are usually the people that are unhappy with their own lives and when they see someone else clearly enjoying things, they feel the need to attack it and try to make it negative, instead of looking at how they can change their own situation for the better.

I teach Primary kids, a composite class of Year 4/5. My class ranges in ability from not being able to recognize numbers or letters to being very competent readers and independent writers and everything in between. The local Aboriginal people up here are called Yolngu and their cultural traditions have primarily been oral ones.

It's doubly hard for these children because they not only have to learn new things like reading and writing, they also have to learn English through English, so we teachers have a specific methodology in teaching them the English language that is a little different to my usual English teaching abroad. My brave little students get my total respect. They are so smart and I enjoy interacting with them.

It's an extremely hard environment to live in sometimes but ultimately very rewarding. The countryside is truly beautiful and untouched in many places. I'm learning so much about Aboriginal culture, the people and about myself. Even though I feel a little bit disconnected at times, I know deep down I've chosen the right thing to do.

I've been working up here for the last six months and plan to stay here for another eighteen months, then maybe take some time off from working and head to India, Nepal and Tibet for a while to get up into the Himalayas for a year or so.

In Japan I came across some things that truly have completely changed how I look at existence on a physical and philosophical level. I don’t think you can underestimate the profound, positive change plants and chemicals have had on my life.

I have no problems with people using drugs to enhance their time on this planet, even though the word “drugs” has so many negative connotations attached to it. Of course there are a lot of problems caused by people taking drugs but there are also lots of positive things that can come of experiencing consciousness in a completely different way to how most other people experience it.

We already have so many culturally sanctioned drugs that cause a litany of problems in society; nicotine, alcohol and over-prescribed anti-depressants being the obvious ones, that I find it offensive when these same people then tell me I can’t take a mind expanding mushroom and just lie back and watch the clouds for four hours, happy in the knowledge that life exists outside our three-dimensional construct. It’s such a ludicrous state of affairs that governments sell you the means (and collect the tax from) products that slowly kill you while giving you all sorts of horrendous health problems, costing the tax payer millions in health care each year and causing untold damage to the social fabric in our lives, but then ban things like mushrooms because they have no so-called medicinal benefit! It’s okay to eat the varieties for food but not the ones that open new worlds. Like cigarettes have any medicinal benefit?! It’s okay to poison yourself slowly and deprive your kids of a parent through premature smoking-related death but it’s not okay to expand your consciousness. People are putting their pre-pubescent children on anti-depressants for fuck’s sake. Wake up! What a fucking disgraceful state of affairs.

There doesn’t seem to be any teaching aspect to my journeys with Salvia so far, just a kind of observational slant. I go over and over them to see if there is something I should be taking from them, more than the voyeurism I have been through, but can’t find anything tangible yet. I enjoy the feeling of being almost scared by a drug experience — not in a physical way but in a mental way, strength of vision rather than weakness of breath. How will you know your own boundaries unless you actually go there?

With 5-MeO-DMT experiences, it’s more of a complete dissolution of reality. To exist with no physical form but to know that you are still existing — it was the most intense out-of-body experience I’ve ever had. You can find a summarized version in the BME scrapbook if you look close enough.

I had one experience where I felt like my head was being surrounded by needle-like probes, rapidly pushing through my skull and into the dark recesses of my mind. It was as though my body was deflating, my essence was being sucked from it. At the same time, swirling patterns of shades of blue were occupying my mind’s eye, just how I imagined the beginning of the Cosmos, that elusive primordial soup, to look like. I was being returned to that space and time. As the rest of my surroundings disappeared and ceased to register with what was left of my body without “me” in it, I could feel myself (the word “myself” here is used not to describe me — my body and who I am in relation to the rest of the visible, material world that we all exist and interact in — but what is behind all of that: the driving force, the pilot guiding us, the controller of our own personal astronaut suit; my essence, my soul, my spirit, whatever you want to call it) being assimilated into everything that exists outside of this 3D construct. I was being made one with the Cosmos and it was being made one with me. I could feel the sensation of traveling through space of some sort but without having any form; moving in all directions simultaneously but yet just merely being. I had no purpose, I had no shell, I had no direction, I had no vision, I just was.

It gave me a wonderfully enriching awareness to know this, to be shown this. You feel like you are not alone out there, that once you leave this tactile world, you are an indistinguishable part of everything. Your essence permeates places that you didn’t know existed or maybe didn’t believe existed. It’s hard not to believe that everything is connected, or can be connected by a force greater than us pathetic, mortal humans after you.

It’s not to everyone’s taste, as I found out during the internship writing, although I was glad that my piece went to print as it was and unedited. I’ll take the good with the bad because I put a lot of effort into my writing to make it different and challenging. You can’t please all of the people all of the time and quite frankly, why would you want to?

I’ve met so many wonderful people through BME and more so IAM and I can’t thank Shannon and the team enough for the time and effort they put into it. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have met at least ninety-five percent of the people I have through this Internet community if it hadn’t been for IAM. We really do owe it a lot. It made me laugh when people started complaining that they had to pay $20 a year to stay on here. Tight fuckers.

The lip sewing was motivated by a photo I’d seen on BME. It spoke to me. I’ve always loved trying things that I’ve never done before so it was an easy transition to try that. As luck would have it, Satomi and Lukas Zpira happened to be in Tokyo at the same time as me, so I called them and we quickly organized a show that would incorporate it. It was much less painful than I had expected. The next day I did a photo shoot on the hotel roof for a Dutch photographer who was compiling a book on body modification and we did it again, but using larger gauge needles. This one was a bit uncomfortable as my lips were still tender from the night before and the needles much more sturdy. Overall though the pictures turned out really well: naked and sunset and sutures. I’ve kind of grown into body sewing from there with my eye sewing/face sewing and body sewing in the next show. Lip sewing is such an audience stimulator that it would be a shame to leave it out now.

Scarification is a beautifying thing. The pain dissolves when you’re in the right head space. I didn’t even feel Lukas do the majority of the deep cuts on my legs, while I had my lips sewn shut and he had sliced my forehead above both eyebrows to let the blood flow down my face. I was in a zone all to myself, looking out at the audience and being in it at the same time. Professional or improvement-driven scarification can indeed result in some quite spectacular designs.

I don’t however believe that an arm full of self-injuring scars, made to act as an alternative coping mechanism for some kind of trauma or emotional issue, falls into the same category as body or spiritual enhancement scarification. Not that they need to be covered up, but I think it is important to stress that there are differences in the reasons as to why people want to scar their bodies, each of them valid to that particular person. In my opinion, if you are frequently cutting your body or self-injuring yourself as a response to some kind of mental or emotional pain or difficulty, you should try and seek professional help immediately. Or ask someone to help you do that. And we as a society should be more open about this and encourage people to seek help, lest it be too late one day.

The blood letting came from a desire to push things a bit further and experiment with myself. It’s hard to describe the feeling of your own warm blood flowing down your face. Feelings of joy and peace spring to mind. Despite what some people believe, those feelings do not stem from any deeper psychological problems I have and they are not related to any self-harm issues. My performances are primarily that: performances. Done in part for myself but predominately for an audience, much the same way that bands get up on stage to showcase their musical ability or magicians their sleight of hand tricks.

As an audience it must be quite alarming to watch for some, in fact two people fainted at the show I did in Melbourne! I love the look of blood on white skin, so vibrant and alive. You know you’re really living then.

My passion for eccentricity goes back to early childhood. Even as a small child, I was greatly unsatisfied with the ordinary reality, and though at that age I couldn’t fully realize how vile the world is, I already found it senseless and dull. At the same time, I was very much attracted to visual eccentricity. I clearly remember that when I saw unconventional looking people, I thought they were fantastic creatures who lived in a totally different, wonderful and exciting reality. I immediately knew that this was what I wanted to be. Obviously, I’m not nearly as romantic about it now as I was at the age of five, but I’ve carried that fascination throughout my life.

I already had quite a lot of piercings and I was a cutter, but I was really confused because cutting was always viewed as something negative and associated with masochism and depression, and I knew I had a totally different reason for doing it. Reading the book confirmed my belief that what I was doing was not something negative and self-destructive, but a wish to explore the effect that pain and body sensations have on the mind.

Also, at the time I was in search of an alternative spirituality. I don’t want to say I’m a spiritual person, but I always felt the need to have it in my life. Modern Primitives made me understand that body modification and body rituals can be a spiritual thing, and I can use my own body for spiritual growth, and that’s what I’m trying to do.

Suffice to say that for several years I was totally into this book. But as I grew older and as I re-read the book over and over again, I started to disagree with a lot of things written in it and my general opinion on it changed, but I still feel grateful for the huge impact it had on my life. It really expanded my horizons.

I’m still very much into indigenous cultures, but I separate aesthetics and spirituality from social order and the way of life that existed in them.

I feel that some people who were interviewed in the book were being conservative and almost close-minded because of their fixation on tribal cultures, criticizing certain types of modifications that were not practiced in them.

And finally, I don’t like the idea of putting all people who do body modifications under one tag — “Modern Primitives” or any other, as a lot of them wouldn’t identify themselves as such.

When I was up in the air, I was totally amazed and astonished by what I felt: there was hardly any pain (or rather, I found it easy to ignore), and I had an out-of-body sensation and the feeling of floating. I always pay lots of attention to the environment where I do my body rituals, and for my first suspension, I chose the seashore and I could feel a positive energy around me. At some point during the suspension, I started to think of different problems and hardships I had in that period of my life, but these thoughts were replaced by the certitude of me being able to live through them. I was surprised by how staggering and deep the experience was: I hadn’t expected that doing a suspension could get me into such an altered state of mind. I felt very strong and full of hope. My first suspension was pure joy!

By far, I found it easiest to transcend the pain in a suicide suspension. It was a bit harder during my coma suspension, but I enjoyed it a lot. What I really love about suicide suspension is the movement is less restricted and you can swing. I like to swing a lot and it strengthens the sensation of floating.

I still haven’t done all types of suspension: I still have a knee and superman to try, and I hope to be able to do them soon.

I don’t have particularly good feelings about that experience, but it remains important because it was the first time I did a play piercing, and because of it, I immediately knew it was something I wanted to continue to explore.

To be honest, before doing play piercing and suspension together for the first time, I didn’t know if I would be able to handle it. So in a way, it was quite a challenge for me to explore my limits. It was a wonderful experience and I got more confident in my potential and the next time I added chest play piercing to facial play piercing and suicide suspension. With body play piercings it’s the sensation of the piercing that makes the strongest impact, and though it’s an important part of facial play piercings as well, it’s surely the visual result that is the most striking.

My right arm tattoo design just came into my mind at some point, quite spontaneously. Because it’s a smile design, I had no problem explaining my idea to the tattoo artist, whose name is Yann, and who does some very original and stunning blackwork.

I’m a person that needs to be progressing in things I do. The same goes for my body: I really enjoy changing, modifying and playing with it, and not doing it makes me feel like I’m stagnant. I’ve always had an urge for creativity, and body modification is one of the ways I can be creative with my Self. I can’t predict the future, but I really hope I will never loose this urge and will never stop transforming, or in a way, creating myself.

In the body modification scene, most of the people I meet don’t understand nor care about the ideas and motivation that are behind the things I do, and I’ve had some disappointing experiences when body modifications artists lose interest in helping me when they find out that I’m not going to do performances. I’m not a performer, and I find it really upsetting that so many people in the scene can’t imagine things like facial play piercing done not as performances.

I perceive myself as a seeker and not a teacher because there are too many self-proclaimed “gurus” who don’t practice what they preach. I’m not even close the spiritual level I hope to be at someday for me to consider being a teacher to anybody, and honestly, it doesn’t really interest me. Plus, speaking specifically about body modification and body rituals, I think there are some things that are impossible to teach. For example, I often meet people who are very scared of pain, and it’s hard for them to understand that not everyone feels the same way as them. I don’t think they can be taught by anybody else but themselves not to have this fear. I think that the ability to explore, control and transcend intentional physical pain is something you naturally have or don’t have and it cannot be taught or discovered by somebody else — they have to learn about it themselves.

But I’m always willing to share, not teach, the things that I know in terms of body rituals and altered states if I see that people are really interested.

After the traumatic haircut, we went to the doctor’s office (because that was the only option back then — there weren’t even piercing guns). I was very nervous as he asked me to lie down on the exam table and he placed a small cork behind my ear, then he took the eighteen gauge needle and he shoved it through my lobe. He then slipped in the gold stud that my mother had brought, as a small flow of tears slipped down my face as I braved myself for the next ear. Again the doctor put a cork behind the second ear and shoved the needle through. When I finally sat up and saw my new earrings, I knew the haircut and the pain was worth it. Even now, many years later, I think about that sacrifice whenever I get pierced.

I have several tattoos signifying my current marriage. There’s a dragonfly on my thigh which represents my life with my husband and the freedom to be me, of being light and air, love and security, beauty and acceptance.

After I graduated with my AA (Associate in Arts — Liberal Science) degree, which I’d been working on for ten years, I wanted something very special, so I got Guy to do some bright “new school” tattoos on my shoulders and arms: one side is a lotus blossom with an eyeball in the center, and the other side is an abstract tentacle blossom with another eyeball in the middle. To me, this symbolizes that no matter what, someone is always watching over me keeping me safe.

Once I got Guy to do my chest piece, which included another eyeball, the meaning behind the eyeballs transformed slightly. Now I see them representing the past, present and future and how they all watch over me. The way I look at it, during all the abuse, things could have been worse: I could have been murdered as well. Something or someone is always watching over me and helping me live.

And they feel good too. After the operation, and for ten years, I had no sexual drive. That is until I got the piercings. Almost immediately, I noticed that I was thinking about sex and that I had the warm feeling “down there” that most women get when they are sexually excited. I really feel that the healing process awakened my sexual drive again. Although it was short-lived, the sensation was so amazing that it made me consider getting more genital modifications. After four years of researching it and thinking about it, I decided to split my hood.

I put the EMLA on, spread it around the jewelry and put it in the hole so that both sides were covered. I was a bit nervous and wondered if I was going to be able to go through with it. I had decided that a scalpel wasn’t right for me, because from reading other experiences, the girls had to cut four or five times to get through the skin, and I wasn’t up for that. The quickest, smartest way for me was with a pair of surgical scissors.

After ten minutes, I wiped off the EMLA cream, because you can’t leave it on mucus membranes for any longer than that. So I took it and I snipped, and I thought, “is this even going through?” and I looked and it was bleeding, and I’m like, “oh shit” and so I snipped a little bit further, and that’s when I could feel the pinch, and I said “okay, you have do it, you’re halfway there.” Another snip, and I was done.

(Click thumbnails to zoom in)
Tools, Before, and with EMLA	After doing the split	The first day of healing	Five days later	After doing the second split

On the other hand, after doing the split I definitely have more feeling down there, so I’m happy with the outcome for that reason too.