I have a lot of jewelry and I don’t really wear much of it. I’m not a huge jewelry person – I wear two sets of studs in my ears to keep the holes from closing and my wedding ring, and that’s about it unless I’m feeling fancy and it’s not winter (necklaces + cold = brrrrr).
So today I went through what I had and I realized a lot of it was stuff from years ago and triggered a lot of weird memories and feelings. There’s my purity ring, the necklace my parents got me when I was thirteen with two itty bitty diamonds to represent childhood and adulthood, random stuff that I picked up over the years: the pair of earrings I wore on the really awkward date Alex and I went on, my first set of earrings ever, a bunch of random stuff….but all from within that 6 year vacuum of when I got my ears pierced until I moved out.
And it was weird, seeing it all laid out on the table as I was cleaning them feeling generally meh and worse as time went on. I put aside the necklace I made the month before my 18th birthday, when I was prepping for my drivers test. Some of my jewelry was like going back through my journals, getting snapshots of moments in time.
It feels heavy. I didn’t realize how many physical remnants of my past I had until I started sorting through it this afternoon. So many negative associations with physical objects, even if I was happy about them at the time. Handling all of it….was a lot.
So I decided to do the cathartic thing, and just throw them out instead of holding on to them or trying to sell them. It’s maybe not the awesomest decision but I don’t need their haunting memories in my life anymore.
I did, though, keep some sentimental pieces (like my wedding set, for instance), and the pieces I really like and actually wear (mostly somewhat geeky, like my dragon-claw dice holder necklace); I feel less bogged down now, and I feel like my collection of jewelry reflects me more accurately than the messy piles of things over 8 years old did… without emotional minefields, too.
Sparkly Sparkly Ghosts
by
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