Body Image
How Piercing My Ears Helped Make Me Whole
Personal Perspective: When life is battling you, earrings can be your talisman.
Posted January 14, 2024 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
![Caroline Leavitt Caroline Leavitt](https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/styles/article_inline_half_caption/public/field_blog_entry_images/2024-01/Screenshot%202024-01-09%20at%201.58.29%20PM.png.jpg?itok=T7zAK1tQ)
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.
![Caroline Leavitt Caroline Leavitt](https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/styles/article_inline_half_caption/public/field_blog_entry_images/2024-01/Screenshot%202024-01-09%20at%201.57.51%20PM.png.jpg?itok=LK2fFsL-)
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.