The air in Sierra Leone carries a weight that Toronto’s West End can never replicate. It is thick with salt, history, and a heat that feels like an embrace. Frances Sesay was only three months old when she first felt the bite of her destiny. There was no sterile chair, no surgical steel, and no numbing agent. “A local medicine woman pierced my ears with a needle,” Frances recalls, a faint smile touching her lips as she reflects on a story her mother told her. “I’m just glad I didn’t get it done with a gun.” That sharp, ancestral initiation was the first sensory detail of a life that would eventually define her purpose.
The journey from that medicine woman’s needle to the CEO’s chair at Piercer’s Choice was not a straight line. It was a jagged, intentional path carved through the concrete of Toronto’s West End. Growing up around Jane and Finch, Frances was the girl who lived for the open air. “I was outside all the time,” she says, laughing. “My sisters would say, ‘Oh, you smell like outside. Go away.’ I was a kid in the mud. I lived outside.” That smell of outside was the scent of a spirit that refused to be contained by four walls.
She was the bubbly, social choreographer of her neighbourhood, demanding perfection from her friends as they rehearsed dance routines to Aaliyah. “I was like, ‘We got to make sure we execute. We can’t disrespect the queen,'” she says. The first time the world tried to handle her, to tell her where she belonged, Frances pushed back. In middle school, she was a Green Giant: tall, social, and a floater between groups. Then came the moment at Oakdale Public School that set her internal compass. She was part of a cooking club and also on the basketball team. One day, a game and a cooking event collided.
“I remember deciding I did not want to go play the game,” Frances explains. As she walked toward the school, her entire team marched past her, their faces set in stone. “It was like, cold shoulder from everybody. I was like, ‘This sucks.’ But I was okay with my decision in the end because I was happy to be a part of what I was doing.” That moment was her first masterclass in power. She realized she was comfortable making decisions that made other people unhappy if it meant she remained whole.
That resolve was tested when her teacher cornered her mother at graduation. “He told my mom, ‘She should not be going to Westview. Send her to St. Joseph’s Morrow Park,'” Frances remembers. Suddenly, the girl from the zone was thrust into a predominantly white, all-girls Catholic school. “I felt like a fish out of water,” she says. In response, she revolted. She built a fortress of badness to keep the world at bay. “I purposely did badly in school. My grades were like 40, 50. I am smart, I just purposely was like, ‘I don’t want to be here.'”
The tension peaked at 8:30 AM in a portable cafeteria. Frances describes the morning she woke up simply wanting to fight. “I vividly remember the thought process of like, ‘I want to fight somebody today.’ I was just angry.” The fight was fast and brutal, ending with a suspension. “I went and sat in the class mostly hyperventilating, but also happy,” she says. Looking back, she sees the retrospective coherence of that anger. She was not fighting the girl in the portable; she was fighting the hour-and-a-half bus ride, the uniforms, and a system that didn’t see her Sierra Leonean roots.
The transition into adulthood was a series of odd jobs, and a humbling stint cleaning apartment building in Oshawa. “I remember vividly one day going to clean up pop cans after a festival… and I’m like, ‘Is this really where I’m at in life right now?'” This brought her to her next experience managing buildings where she observed the psychology of power. She watched regional managers refer to human beings as numbers. “He’s referring to tenants by their unit number. ‘What’s going on with 1201? What’s going on with 1808?'” Frances refused to do the same. She saw the woman going to the food bank and the man struggling with rent. She saw the humans behind the units.
The pivot to her true calling came in a moment of stillness with her partner, Cal. He suggested piercing. Most people would have dipped their toe in; Frances dove into the deep end. “I told myself I am going to give myself 30 days of solidly looking into piercing.” She found the Piercing Bible and read it cover to cover, twice. “First time just to take it all in. Second time to actually actively make notes on it.”
At the time, she was working on an assembly line at a Lindor box factory. It was a repetitive, soul-crushing grind, but it was there she found her clarity. “I was on the assembly line… and I prayed. I’m like, ‘God, can you please give me a step up from this so that I can get the next step into an apprenticeship?'” Within days, the agency called. She took a receptionist job at a steel company, using her downtime to finish an online anatomy course and get her bloodborne pathogen certificate. She was strategic, creating a spreadsheet of every shop in Scarborough.
When a shop finally said “Maybe,” she pushed the envelope. “I told them, ‘Look, I can come after work just to help… unpaid.'” To secure the apprenticeship, she had to leave her stable corporate job with its benefits, a move that made her sisters send her “real” job postings for years. “They were devastated,” she says of her corporate bosses. “They were like, ‘What? You’re leaving to become a piercer?'” Frances knew. She accepted $500 a week to clean and learn because she believed in the craft.
“I took a chance on myself,” she says firmly. Today, she understands that she is a facilitator of healing. She sees the women who come to her to reclaim their bodies after miscarriage or assault. She has integrated her history, her Sierra Leonean identity, and her corporate discipline into a business that serves as a sanctuary.
When asked what she would tell the next generation of Black women looking to build something unconventional, her voice is steady and unapologetic. “Be intentional and do not listen to the naysayers. The validation might not come until years later from other people, but you have to find whatever it is you need to do within to keep going. Most of the time people are projecting their own experience onto you.”
Seven years into her career, the “Green Giant” from Oakdale has found her rhythm. She no longer smells like the outside of someone else’s playground; she smells like the success of her own making. She has staked her course, and in every piercing, she proves that the only validation that truly matters is the kind you give yourself.
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