How Piercing My Ears Helped Make Me Whole

One of my fave pairs of earrings

Source: Caroline Leavitt

I never considered myself an earring person in my teens, maybe because what I wanted most of all then was to vanish. Sensitive, shy, mocked in my working-class school, I straightened the wild rumpus hair other kids mocked or pulled or threatened to cut, and tried to hide out in dark, shapeless clothes. I hid in my first marriage, too, lonely and writing while my husband worked all day as an attorney, living in a quiet Pittsburgh suburb that seemed nothing like me. But then my husband booted me out of our home to make room for another woman, and I fled that home for another in outrageous Manhattan, determined to change.

And that’s where I discovered earrings—and myself.

With everyone around me in New York City looking so cool and hip, I stopped straightening my hair because, like me, it was going to finally do its own thing. I began to wear the interesting and strange dresses I found in thrift shops, to actually like how I felt when someone noticed me. The piece de resistance was when I passed an earring store offering free piercing with purchase. I hesitated. What would make me feel better? Make me even more different than who I had been before? What, I asked myself, would a brave, bad-ass woman do?

I knew the answer. I went inside.

I barely said a word while my ears were being pierced, the tiny round studs that I’d have to wear for six weeks inserted. But once they were, I felt my whole body glow. “I’m so cool now!” I blurted, and the guy who had pierced my ears laughed—but with me, not at me. Now, because of my brand-new earrings, I could tell the difference.

Once I could wear any earrings I wanted, I began a collection. I hit the outdoor street fairs, and soon I had a big enough stash to require a cork bulletin board to display them. Twenty pairs, then 40, and then 60. My first earrings were whimsical, pink glass pigs and sequined dogs. I had airplanes and fishbones and even tiny plastic babies, those designs giving way to shoulder dusters and outrageous sparklers. Maybe I was still a little shy, but my earrings spoke to me. Even better, they began to speak to other people, too, as if they were a barometer of what connection with me might be.

People stopped me on the street to talk about them, and then I began to reach out to people, too, to ask where’d you get those earrings? To compare notes. Sometimes, to become friends.

Time's grief can be fixed by the right pair of earrings.

Source: Caroline Leavitt

The more I wore earrings, the more I discovered their powers. For a few months, glass earrings were good luck charms and I wore the same pair every day until my luck ran out, and then I gave that pair away.

Earrings connected me to loved ones with powerful emotion. The green wood earrings my mom gave me make me feel she’s still alive every time I wear them. I don’t wear the gorgeous blue crystal ones my sister gave me because she estranged herself from me, but I keep them, with a mixture of hurt and hope, that someday we will have a connection again, and then I can thread them through my lobes again.

My earrings offer me a tangible sense of my life history. Here is the pair a boyfriend gave me, turquoise, which I don’t like and only wore because he liked them. Here is a pair my husband bought me, gorgeously shiny because, well...he knows me. I love them, but not as much as I love him for noticing.

Every year, I carefully cull my herd of earrings. Here, a brass pair that’s too heavy, too small, too big, doesn’t work anymore. There, a pair that is a bit too loud, even for me. It’s not that my earrings have changed, but I have, and my earrings clock that progress.

Nowadays, earrings mean something different. I no longer need my earrings to do the talking because I have my own strong voice now, fueled by the confidence my earbobs gave me. You could say I sing the earring manifesto, wanting everyone to thrill to their power the way I do. I even made earrings a character in my new novel, Days of Wonder, where a pair of complicated hoops on an older woman sets my heroine off on a new trajectory. I’ll always have holes in my ears, and maybe holes in my heart from missing my mother and my estranged sister, but I know, better than anyone, that it is these holes that make me whole.