I close my eyes and breathe out deeply as the needle slides through my nipple. My internal monologue sounds something like “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck ow” but I manage not to make a sound as my piercer slides my new jewelry into place. My girlfriend gives me a reassuring “Good job, baby!” and I feel a rush of adrenaline kick in. After a juice box and a few reassuring hand squeezes from Leah, I’m ready for the next one. In and out, even easier than the first. I check myself out in the mirror and damn, I look hot.

My nipples mark my ninth and tenth piercings, most of which I’ve accumulated in only the past year. They go well with the six tattoos I’ve racked up since turning eighteen, three stick and pokes done on dorm room floors or in a friend’s apartment at one in the morning, and three professional pieces of varying quality and degree of sincere meaning. My body is a collection of small mistakes and self-expressions that would make your great aunt cringe, and I finally love it.

At age sixteen, I was a babe. Blonde hair, big blue eyes, comically large breasts paired with a slim waist and an ass that had finally decided to exist, and a disposition that was somewhere in between meek and deferential and outgoing as hell, depending on my company. Like my personality, I molded my body to fit what other people wanted. I wore the clothes my series of boyfriends liked, put on high heels that hurt my feet and made me hate the world by the end of the day, and spent thirty minutes in the morning just putting on my makeup and stressing about how my hair looked, trying to fit the image of the sexy but sweet little girl I thought I was supposed to be.

In short, I fell into the trap that any sixteen-year-old girl is liable to plunge into: my body was not mine, it was a collage of small compromises determined by the desires of others. I couldn’t decide to cut my hair, or buy a new dress, or even put on a bright lipstick, without consulting a bevy of my friends first, a phenomenon that is disturbingly common, especially among adolescent girls. After a lifetime of being told what to do with our bodies by parents, school dress codes, magazines, television, and our peers, we seem to have lost the ability to make our own decisions about our own body without external input.

The first decision I truly made about my own body didn’t happen until I was almost halfway through being seventeen. After years of alternately trying to hide and flaunt my breasts, both hating and craving the attention they gave me, I finally made the call. I talked to my doctor, I set up the consultation, and I scheduled the surgery. And on July 14, 2015, I stumbled out of a four-hour surgery with new, handful sized breasts and (literally) the biggest weight off of my chest.

A year later, and the momentum has stuck. After my first honest-to-god decision regarding my own body, it’s been so much easier to make my body my own. Tattoos, piercings, haircuts, and a virtually replaced wardrobe have helped to transform my body from a glorified mask to a badass, kickboxing, beautiful, sexy, strong fortress of individuality. I am a pretty, pierced, tattooed terror and I fucking love it.

The moral of the story is this: that haircut you don’t know if you can pull off, the piercing you’ve wanted for months but are too scared to get because of what someone else will say, the dress that you love but never seem to wear out because it doesn’t fit in with the clothes your friends wear, the tattoo that you’ve held back from getting because of what your mom will think, pull a Nike and just do it. You’ve heard this again and again, but it’s time to start acting on it. Your body is your body, and you deserve to do whatever the fuck you want with it.