The first day I walked into the Shop for my apprenticeship, I was nervous. Not a normal nervous. A nervous that made your stomach roll and your head spin. I was beginning a journey that I was sure would change my perspective of my entire life. And it did, in a manner of speaking. 

As the bell on the door finished ringing and the door smacked against its casing, I felt myself liquify. Sitting behind a counter, looking at all kinds of badass I felt I would never be able to pull off, was my new mentor. She had given me the task of writing a few essays on influential people in the piercing community as well as the history of body modification in general and the different types of jewelry companies.

I had learned a lot in a very short amount of time and I felt ready to take on the world. Then she handed me the mop. 

I know, I know. ‘Earn your keep” and all that but I felt my heart sink a little before I plastered a smile on my face, just happy I could be in the same space, I supposed. This was my dream, after all. It’s all I had wanted to do for years. It was a deep, burning passion that kept me sweeping and mopping the floors, emptying the trash, and scrubbing the baseboards and the toilets for months. When she finally let me hold the jewelry, I was so excited I couldn’t stop smiling. She’d given me ‘throw-away’ jewelry that wasn’t good enough to be put in the high-end collection we carried. It was homework. I was slowly learning the different sizes and closure styles. 

I regularly visit the website of the Association of Professional Piercers and the board members' social media. To the point of near stalking probably. It didn’t matter, though, because I was finally starting to feel a sense of belonging. Right? Even when I started being told to go fetch cigarettes at the gas station, I still showed up.  And when I was regularly reprimanded for having to leave to go to a job that paid my gas money and rent, I apologized. When I was alone in the shop for hours or whole days at a time, learning nothing other than people really don’t like someone not showing up to perform a piercing when they had scheduled it in advance, I smiled and made excuses for her. 

Because that’s what you do, right? That’s what you suck up and allow to happen to you when you’re chasing a dream. 

I was always there early and left late. I made sure everything was spotless and that the inventory was accounted for. Never once did I complain about her not bothering to come in to teach me or explain how I felt my time and energy were being wasted. I didn’t tell anyone how she would berate me and belittle me for small mistakes - I now know that they were small, having the knowledge of several years of experience. It felt like a betrayal to her, the woman I felt I owed so much for allowing me the opportunity to learn a craft that had been so coveted and felt so secretive. She had allowed me to walk past the velvet rope and enter into a whole new life.

 So I continued. 

She offered to make me a manager to which I beamed. She let me perform changeouts but only if they were fully healed. (I definitely changed out some unfinished healing holes.) And she asked me to help set up another business that she had, unrelated to piercing entirely, which I gleefully did, even giving her ideas to use. Even offering my partner’s woodworking skills to her. (Later, after everything was over, he would tell me I had never been good enough but that’s another story altogether.) 

I met her boyfriend who who she said was a skinhead. He had been only nice to her and regularly gave me the creeps. But that could’ve me just being young and untried in social situations like that.

I met her parents who owned a massive business that allowed her freedom to do as she pleased. But did I really know that or did I just assume that they let her have money from the stories she’d told? 

I met her dog who I think about every time I listen to Coheed and Cambria. 

I met a woman who became who would eventually be my second mentor - still not great, but considering she had grown up with my first one, who’s shocked? I certainly was. 

I got the chance to cultivate my love for the craft. I missed out on the chance to go to Vegas with her. A trip that I’m sure I would have regretted. That fire of anxiety or misguided passion that had always kept me quiet against the abuse I was receiving from her and other people in my life was wavering. Flickering and slowly but surely fading as I got older and stronger. I had always been observant and smart but I was a constant blockade to the intuitive message in my gut. I had been told too many times by others that I was wrong. But when she offered me the chance to go to the conference free of charge - I was suspicious. 

I took the opportunity but I started questioning things. I asked people and listened to her conversations with people. I started realizing that my mentor, the person that I held up so high, was a shitbag. I found out she had been planning to get me drunk in the hotel room so I could ‘network’ with other piercers. It shattered my world. 

Nothing could go back to the way things were after that. 

But the thing is, I don’t hate her. I couldn’t. Even with the things I know and the things she did.  She was my mentor and the first person to ever say, “You've got this.” No matter if it was followed by some passive-aggressive sentence. So now, when I look back at the old handwash log I had saved in my phone or the emails of my essays left in the sent box of my email, I still feel a slice of that same person who walked into that shop and asked for an apprenticeship.