The Things We Reach For
Amanda did not know about the earrings when she chose that color for me. I wear them together now and I feel something I can only describe as held. Recognized.
A fellow jewelry maker friend—
Shared something with me recently that I have not been able to stop thinking about.
It is called transitional object theory. The idea, rooted in psychology, is that humans instinctively reach for physical objects to feel held. Safe. Connected to something or someone when we need grounding. Most of us first encounter this as children — the beloved blanket, the worn stuffed animal, the thing that had to come everywhere or the world felt unsteady. But the theory does not stop at childhood. It suggests that this instinct to reach for a physical object when we need comfort or anchoring is deeply, fundamentally human. It does not go away when we grow up. It just finds new objects.
I heard this and immediately thought about earrings.
Think about the moments when you reach for a specific pair. Not the ones you grab because they match the outfit or because they are closest to the door. The other ones. The ones you reach for on hard days, or important days, or the days when you need to feel most like yourself before you walk out into whatever is waiting.
You probably know which pairs those are without having to think too hard. Most women do.
That reaching — that specific, intentional choosing of the thing that makes you feel held — is not vanity and it is not habit. It is something much older and much more essential than either of those things. It is the human animal doing what it has always done: finding the object that says you are okay, you are here, you are you.
This is why I talk about earrings first.
Not because earrings are more important than the rest of the outfit — though I will argue they come close. But because earrings sit closest to the face. To the eyes and the mouth, the places where expression lives. Because you feel them when you move, a small weight or swing that reminds you they are there. Because catching a glimpse of them in a mirror or a window throughout the day is a small, repeated act of recognition.
Oh yes. Those ones. I chose those today.
That is not a small thing. That is you, anchoring yourself in your own identity, multiple times a day, without even thinking about it.
I have a pair of earrings that functions this way for me.
They came from scraps I was playing with one evening — simple round discs in muted greens and golds, with flecks of gold glitter caught in the surface, almost pearl-like. A one-off piece, nothing planned, just me seeing what happened. I loved them immediately in the quiet way you love something that wasn't trying to be anything and became something anyway. I added a round hoop, a textured gold finding, and that was that.
What I did not know when I made them was that this exact shade of green would come back to me in a different form.
My friend Amanda Shrader is a photographer and the creator of the Skirt Project — a beautiful, ongoing work that creates spaces for women to be seen, celebrated, and empowered. One of the ways she does that is by naming a skirt after a specific woman. A few years ago she honored me that way. And the color she chose, the green she looked at and decided was mine, was the same muted sage green as those earrings I had made from scraps.
The earrings came first. The skirt came after. Amanda did not know about the earrings when she named the color mine.
I wear them together now. The skirt and the earrings, the same green, one made by my hands and one made by a friend who somehow saw the same color in me that I had already found in the clay. When I put them on together I feel something I can only describe as held. Recognized. Like the universe occasionally decides to be a little bit poetic and this was one of those times.
That pair of earrings is my transitional object. Not because I decided it would be — because it became one, gradually, through meaning that accumulated without my planning it.
That is what I want every Anam Cara piece to have the possibility of becoming.
Not just something beautiful to wear. Something to reach for. Something that holds a little piece of who you are and gives it back to you on the days when you need the reminder.
The right pair of earrings can do that. I have seen it happen at market tables, in messages from customers, in the way a woman's whole face changes when she puts something on and it fits — not just her ears, but her sense of herself.
Earrings first. Because sometimes the first thing you put on is the thing that makes everything else possible.