The necklace I unclasped the moment I chose myself

There is a particular sound a clasp makes when it finally gives, that small metallic exhale. It happened on a Tuesday in my share house in Fitzroy, blinds half-drawn, coffee cooling on the windowsill. The necklace belonged to someone else, and the moment I took it off, the room tilted back toward me.

He gave it to me two years ago on a winter trip to Hobart, when the air smelled of woodsmoke and we still believed we were good for each other. It was a thin gold chain with a pendant he picked in Salamanca Place because he thought it would suit my collarbone. He was wrong about that, and about many other things, but I wore it because wearing it felt like proof that I was loved.

Writing this feels strange, like reading an old journal. The blog you are reading is built on the wreckage of those kinds of entries. I started Never Date a Writer because the wreckage kept producing sentences, and the sentences kept producing strangers who wrote to me saying they had a necklace too, or a ring, or a coat still hanging in someone else's hallway.

Australia teaches us to underplay heartbreak. We are told to be laid-back, to crack a joke, to say we are right as rain when we are clearly not. This essay is my small rebellion. Here is what I removed, where, and what I found underneath.

The morning I stopped pretending

The Tuesday began like most Tuesdays in Melbourne, with tram bells and someone arguing about vegan butter in the cafe below my flat. I had told myself for months that the necklace was simply jewelry, that sentiment had nothing to do with it, that I wore it from habit. Habit, I learned, is just a polite word for surrender.

I caught my reflection and saw a version of myself I no longer recognised. The chain had become a punctuation mark, a way of announcing I still belonged to someone. When I lifted it over my head, the mirror showed me a woman with her own shoulders, and that startled me more than the breakup ever had.

What the clasp was holding

A necklace carries more than its weight in metal. It carries the dinners, the cab rides home, the way his hand used to drift to the back of your neck when he was feeling generous. When I undid that clasp, I released a whole calendar of small agreements I had made on his behalf.

There were agreements about my hair, which he liked a certain way. Agreements about holidays, about cities we would live in, about the version of me he preferred around his mates. None of this was written down, but it was worn daily, and the gold chain had become its uniform.

Letting it land somewhere real

I did not throw the necklace into the Yarra. I thought about it, standing on the bridge at Southbank with the chain looped around my fingers, but I am not a cinematic person. Instead, I placed it in a ceramic dish on my dresser and let it sit while I figured out what to do. Some things need to be witnessed before they are released.

A week later, a friend and I drove to a market in the Adelaide Hills, where farmers sell olives beside jars of local honey. I swapped the necklace for a rough-cut Australian opal pendant that I wear most days. The opal catches the light differently every hour, and it belongs to no story except my own.

Walking lighter through borrowed streets

That first week without the chain, I walked more than I had in years. I took the coastal path from Bondi to Bronte at sunrise, wandered the Melbourne laneways until my feet ached, sat on the grass at Brisbane's South Bank watching the city do its evening things. Each walk was a refusal to be the woman who checked her phone for someone else's opinion.

I bought flat leather sandals from a Brunswick market stall, and they became my favourite shoes. I wrote about those flat sandals in an earlier post, and they are still the closest thing I own to a quiet kind of freedom. They were exactly what I needed after years of being told what to put on my body.

Learning to wear my own adornments

Choosing myself is not one dramatic gesture. It is a thousand small ones, repeated daily. Buying the opal without asking permission. Answering the phone when I want to, ignoring it when I do not. Letting my hair dry however it chooses. Wearing the same jumper three days running because I like the smell of my own laundry.

Australian summers are long and honest, and they demand you show up in your body without apology. I wear linen in December the way other people wear wool in July. The opal sits at my throat and nobody owns the story of it but me.

The version of me who still wears the chain

She visits sometimes, that earlier version of myself. She shows up when I am tired, when a song from that Hobart trip plays in a Coles supermarket, when someone I am dating says something kind and I want to disqualify it. I let her visit. I do not let her drive.

I think about the women who wrote to me about their own necklaces, their rings, their coats hanging in hallways. I think about how many of us were taught that being chosen by someone else was the beginning of the story, when really it was the beginning of the negotiation. Choosing yourself is the part where the story finally belongs to you.

What sits on the dresser now

The ceramic dish is still there, but it holds something different now. Inside it sits a small notebook where I write the promises I am keeping to myself. Some days the promises are large. Some days they are as small as drinking enough water before noon.

The necklace is in a box at the back of my wardrobe. I am not ready to throw it away, and I have stopped pretending that keeping it means I have not moved on. Moving on is not the same as erasing. It is knowing that a thing can sit quietly in a box while you live an entire life without consulting it.

If you have your own clasp to undo, your own small ceremonial object that has outlived its welcome, I would love to hear from you. The contact form is open, the submission guidelines are open, and the comments are open. Tell me what you took off, and what you put on instead. Tell me where you were standing when you finally chose yourself. I read every message, even the ones that arrive at 3 a.m. from women sitting in share houses in Fitzroy with coffee gone cold on the windowsill.