My ears feel as if they were struck ablaze.

As an adult who tends to make good decisions, I made another decision last night. I put my gauges back in after more than a year's time. I dropped in size from 3/4 to 00. As the discomfort of stretching is still in effect, hours after the fact, I'm regretting that decision that was made 15 months prior. Now if I ever decide to get back up in the size I was at previously,  it will be an absolute sonofabitch.

I remember making the decision to let my ears close up. It was the day before my 28th birthday. I had never told anyone what the real reason was, but I was trying to decide if I wanted to keep acting like a kid or if I wanted to accept being an adult. I rationalized it by saying "I don't want to be that 60-year-old with giant gauges." I made a decision that I was going to try to become what I thought was the idea of an adult. Looking back, I made that decision a few months prior to making a decision about wanting to take my own life, so clearly I made good decisions. These days, I look at the glass more half full because I have a passion fueled purpose. I like being excited about what I do, I like that I haven't thought about hurting myself in more time than the prior record. But I notice it in others now.

One of the girls at school has been struggling with coming into her own, And it's a lot of the struggle I've gone through, and I don't want to see other people making the same self-destructive mistakes I made. I tried narrowing it down to the three things that I've reflected on and recognize in my own progress. This is the overview.

1. Get comfortable with where you are.
2. Become comfortable with who you are.
3. Find confidence in the person you are going to become.

It took me about two months before I started talking to new people. It was four months in that I could start speaking confidently, and I started discovering more of who I am, and it was six months in that I wanted to start sharing that information with others. I honestly can't wait to see what the next year brings.

So back to my original story, I've decided that I hate having my ears dressing up as cat buttholes in all of my pictures. I'm at 00, and who knows what I do with them. I may go up in size, I may keep them here since they have shrank as much as they could. That's a future Chris decision. Present Chris just completely forgot how much of a dummy 23-year-old Chris was for doing this in the first place. 

Ah, the joys of life.