The necklace I wore when I needed luck
I do not usually believe that an object can change the odds. Still, on the morning I emailed a personal essay about leaving a three-year relationship, I fastened a small gold necklace beneath my shirt. I wore my grandmother’s necklace when I needed luck, and that morning the word covered courage, timing and the hope that honesty might find a reader.
The chain was thin enough to disappear under a collar, while the pendant rested against my sternum. It had arrived in a padded envelope after her funeral, with the clasp tied in green thread. I had kept it in a drawer for months. On submission day, I wanted something of hers close enough to steady me.
A small inheritance
My grandmother grew up in western Ukraine and arrived in Sydney carrying little besides a cloth bag and her sister’s photographs. Years later, she cleaned offices and cooked with garlic, paprika and whatever filled the bottom of the fridge. She also loved cinema, especially films that turned family rooms into living history. She once read with me an essay on Ukrainian cinematic inheritance and recognised the same impulse: keep what a story has earned.
For my twenty-first birthday, she pressed the necklace into my palm. “Keep it for decisions that make you sweat,” she said. Its oval pendant held a dark green stone, scratched and modest, on a chain borrowed from her own mother. After the funeral, I found the green thread still knotted around the clasp.
The morning I sent it
My email was scheduled for 9:07 a.m. on a Friday in January, when Sydney’s humidity could dampen the paper beside my keyboard. I was waiting at a pedestrian light on Pitt Street when the reminder appeared. The essay described my decision to end a relationship that everyone else seemed determined to preserve. Its final line sat in the draft, clean and frightening.
The date fell during the Australia Day long weekend, when Sydney families packed cars with folding chairs, sunscreen and barbecue food. My own holiday had ended quietly. I changed the filename twice, worried that my old surname in the document metadata would undo the ending. Then I touched the pendant, pressed Attach, and sent it before doubt could dress itself as prudence.
A repair in Melbourne
Six weeks later, I took a train to Melbourne, where bright sunshine on one afternoon became a cold wind by dinner. At Queen Victoria Market, shoppers moved between produce stalls with green reusable bags tucked under one arm. The necklace’s clasp had opened near its final link. Between trays of old coins and repaired brooches, a jewellery repairer tightened it while I drank coffee from a paper cup.
While she worked, an older man waiting beside us explained that his late wife had sewn a green button inside his jacket for every driving test. After she finished, he gave me a solemn nod, as though the clasp repair had joined us to the same quiet ritual. I paid less than the coffee beside it. Walking away, the necklace felt less like a private charm and more like a link in a chain.
What the pendant carried
The pendant carried more than luck. It held my grandmother’s early mornings, my parents’ fifteen-minute careful conversation after the funeral, and the blue tin where I had kept unsent birthday cards. It also carried my first relationship, with its shared playlists, late walks and eventual silence. When I fastened it before meeting someone new, I could remember that survival did not have to imitate the shape of the past.
My grandmother never promised the necklace would change an editor’s mind or soften a rejection. “Wear it when you’re afraid,” she had said. “Don’t be ashamed of being afraid.” The advice felt harder than any promise of success. Fear, in her account, deserved attention before action, not avoidance in its place.
The answer that came late
Three days later, a rejection arrived. It was courteous, specific and final. I read it twice, showered, then fastened the necklace before opening a second journal’s submission page. I shortened the piece, changed its title and tried somewhere else. Five weeks later, an editor wrote asking whether I could send a revised sample.
I did, and the revised story was accepted by a small literary magazine. The necklace had not produced the result; my repeated work had been read. When the acceptance email arrived, I touched the pendant out of habit, then returned to the document and began fixing the next paragraph.
A ritual without superstition
The necklace now lives on my bedside table beside the books I am reading. I wear it for manuscript deadlines, first dates and conversations where I might otherwise make polite excuses. It is not a uniform for every public event. Its scratched stone looks too private for a celebration that belongs to everyone.
When I fasten it, I am choosing a small sequence: remember why the moment matters, act, then do the work after the feeling passes. Sometimes that work is an essay. Sometimes it is answering honestly. The chain gives no guarantee, only a visible marker of intent.
The stories people carry
Readers have sent me descriptions of their own lucky objects after I began discussing mine. One woman carries a chipped blue thimble from her first apartment. A man keeps the bus ticket he used when he arrived in Perth after years away. My own chain now holds films, departures and one clean sentence that changed my life.
The submissions page at Never Date a Writer welcomes personal essays and fiction in which ordinary things carry complicated memories. These stories need not prove that an object produces good fortune. Their value lies in what people choose to remember beside it, and in the honesty they can offer someone who came before.
If an object has carried more than its price, let it mark the moment you chose to begin again. Send its story to the submissions page, changing names when privacy matters, and tell what happened before it, who held it, and what you did afterward. The object may be ordinary; the courage it marks need not be.