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One of my connections Todrite wrote a post today about people with facial piercings and tattoos and how he didn’t care for it and thought that those people would have a hard time finding work, love and would regret their choices later in life. In some cases those things may be true, but not always.
It’s really not fair for us to put our preferences and beliefs onto others as insults or judgements. Yes, some people may get facial adornments and it will ruin their lives because they did it on a whim or out of drunken stupidity. Some people made a conscious choice, and have thought about the long-term consequences.
I mentioned in a comment that I once had a crush on a woman with a rather large Celtic facial tattoo. She was a wonderful person, sweet and funny and smart, and her tattoo actually looked lovely, at least to me. She was a mother and had a job that supported herself and her child. Sure, she got stares and comments, but she did what she did to honor her heritage and decorate her body as she saw fit.
It was also implied that intelligent people couldn’t love someone with piercings or tattoos outside of certain areas and that a decorated person’s choices would be slim and not pleasing. That’s just wrong thinking in my opinion. If someone with no arms or someone who has birth defects can find true love and happiness, so can anyone else. Love sees through a different set of eyes. Someone the world thinks is hideous may seem like the epitome of beauty to someone else. And not everyone who chooses to decorate their body in extreme ways is a bad person. Many if not most of them are probably great people, if others would simply look beyond the surface.
As for not being able to find work, that’s another misconception. There are hundreds of jobs where a person’s appearance wouldn’t be much of an issue. Good jobs too. Sure, becoming a lawyer or childcare worker may be out, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a variety of fulfilling and lucrative job options available. People who tattoo or pierce themselves in extreme or obvious ways aren’t usually looking to be cubicle sheep anyway.
I think we all need to take a step back and stop judging others based on our own preferences. There’s a place for everyone in the world, and every person can be happy. It’s not our place to insult them or tell them they’re wrong. We can offer our opinions, but in the end, that’s all they are: opinions. We can’t judge the whole on the few either. Just because one person gets drunk and tattoos something horrible on their face doesn’t mean that everyone made their decisions the same way.
Different people are beautiful in different ways. You don’t have to do what they do, or even like that they did it, but you owe them the respect of not judging them when you don’t know their story.
