What Starting Over Taught Me About Jewelry

It is a Sunday morning in late spring and I am standing in a new apartment in a city I have lived in for exactly thirty-one days, looking at the corner where five boxes still sit unopened, none of which I can bring myself to label more specifically than miscellaneous. The light coming through the window is not the light I am used to. The apartment is not the apartment I am used to. The version of me standing in it is not, I am realizing slowly, the version of me I am used to either. Everything has moved at once, and the parts of me that should have arrived with the rest of the move are still in transit, somewhere between the old life and whatever this is becoming. This is what beginning again actually looks like from inside it, and it is not the photograph anyone takes of it.

Internal medicine residency is ending in a few weeks. For three years I was the person on the floor who was supposed to know the answer, and for three years I mostly did, or could reason my way to one that was at least defensible. The pager would go off and a nurse would call about a patient I had never met and the next move would emerge somewhere in the space between my training and the situation in front of me. I did not love every shift, but I did love being the person who was asked. There is a particular kind of belonging in being known by a building, and the hospital had come to know me through three years of nights and weekends and the slow accumulation of small decisions made under pressure. I belonged to the place, and the place belonged to me. Then on a Tuesday in June, it was over. I signed out my last patient, walked out through the same revolving door I had walked through a thousand times, and the next morning I was someone who used to be a resident. The muscle that had carried me through three years was suddenly being asked to do nothing, which it was not built to do. What no one tells you about the ending of a long thing is that you do not get to choose how it feels. I had imagined relief, exhaustion lifting, time opening up, the long deferred sense of being done. What I got instead was the strange flat afternoon of a Wednesday with no one paging me, and the slow recognition that the thing I had been describing as exhausting was also the thing that had been holding me up.

Cardiology fellowship starts in a few weeks. By the time it does I will have moved to a new city, set up a new apartment, met my new colleagues, and started over as the person who is supposed to be learning rather than the person who is supposed to know. It is, technically, a promotion. The salary is slightly better, and the hours are arguably worse. The work is more specialized, which means I will spend the next three years becoming someone who knows something deeply rather than someone who knows many things adequately. Everyone has told me this is the right next move. I believe them, but the believing does not change the fact that on the first day of fellowship I will walk into a building where no one knows me, no one has worked alongside me, no one has watched me develop into whatever I have become, and the muscle I built over the last three years will not be the muscle I am being asked to use. There is a particular indignity in becoming a beginner after being an expert, and it is the indignity I am about to walk back into. There will be a new attending I do not yet know, a new electronic health record I have not yet learned, a new building whose stairs I will get lost in for the first six weeks. The work will be the work, but the orientation will not. I will be the person asking the question rather than the person being asked. This is, I am told, how you become someone who knows something. You have to stop being someone who knows everything first.

The apartment is part of this. We moved from a place I knew the floor plan of without looking at it to a place where I still forget which drawer holds the silverware. My friends are mostly in the old city, in the time zone I have left, and the version of my social life that was built around being within walking distance of three people I love is now a version that requires planning and group texts and the negotiation of weekend visits across the country. In the corner of the new apartment, five boxes still sit unopened. I have looked into each of them and cannot bring myself to label any of them more specifically than miscellaneous. Each one contains the small things that did not belong to a category in the old apartment and now do not belong to a category in the new one either. A drawer of cables I have not used in two years. A stack of cards from people I no longer know how to thank. A set of small ceramic dishes that held jewelry on the old dresser and do not quite fit the new dresser. None of it is important, and none of it can be thrown away. They are the boxes that show up when you are between two lives.

We have been buying furniture to fill the new apartment, and this part I did not expect to be difficult. I have moved before, and I know my taste, which is that I know what wood I like, what color I like, what shape of lamp I have always reached for. What I am discovering, slowly and uncomfortably, is that the apartment is making me reconsider all of it. The wood tone that worked in the old place looks orange against these new walls. The lamp that had presence in the old corner looks small in this corner. The chair I picked because it looked like a chair I would always have, looks now like a chair that belongs to a slightly younger version of me. The taste I came in with is not quite the taste the new apartment is asking me to inhabit, and the shift is happening not because I have decided anything new about who I am, but because the new place is asking different questions of me than the old place did. The hardest part is that I cannot tell, while it is happening, whether the new taste is better or worse than the old one. It is just different. And the difference is mine, even though it does not yet feel like mine.

The jewelry is doing the same thing. I have a small dish on the new dresser where the rings live, and the chains I wore for years still come out of it most mornings, and they still sit at the collarbone the way they always have. But I have added pieces lately that do not quite belong to the wardrobe I came in with. A heavier chain than I would have chosen two years ago. A ring with more presence than my usual ring. A pearl I bought on a Tuesday on a whim and have not worn yet, because I do not yet know how to wear it next to the things I already own. These pieces are not wrong. They feel like mine in a way I cannot yet defend. They just do not yet sit comfortably alongside the pieces that have been with me for longer. This is what changing taste feels like from inside the change. The new piece arrives and does not match anything you own. You wear it once and feel slightly costumed in your own clothing. You put it back in the dish and reach for the familiar piece instead. The familiar piece is fine; it has done its work. But you know, somewhere lower than thought, that the new piece is the one trying to teach you something about the version of yourself you are becoming, and that the work of beginning again involves wearing it anyway, even on the mornings when it feels like a borrowed piece.

I am told, by people who have been through this kind of transition more than once, that the new taste eventually becomes the actual taste. The unfamiliar piece eventually becomes the most worn piece. The boxes in the corner eventually get opened, most of what is in them gets thrown away, the small ceramic dishes find their right drawer, and the wood tone stops reading as orange and starts reading as itself again. I am told all of this is true, even though I have not yet experienced any of it. I am still in the part where I am wearing the new chain while not quite recognizing the woman wearing it. But the wearing is what matters, and the choosing is what matters. The going to the dish on the dresser, picking up the new piece, and putting it on instead of the old piece, even on the mornings when the old piece would be easier, is how the new piece eventually becomes mine. The piece teaches the wearer, and the wearer becomes the piece. The version of me that will exist in a year, in the cardiology fellowship in the new apartment in the new city, is being built right now in these small daily decisions about which piece to put on, and which boxes to leave in the corner for another week, and which version of the chair to pick from the showroom.

If you are also in this part of a transition, the brand has a longer reading on starting a jewelry collection from what you already wear, which is the practical version of what this essay is the emotional version of. The principle is the same. You begin with what is already yours, and you add the new piece slowly, and the slowness is the point. The boxes will get opened. I know this even if I do not yet believe it. The wood tone will settle. The new chain will become the chain at the collarbone the way the old chain used to be, and one morning, probably without my noticing it, I will reach into the dish for the piece I bought on the whim and put it on without hesitation, the way I used to put on the pieces I had worn for years. This is what starting over actually looks like from inside it. Not the dramatic clean break the photographs suggest. Just the slow daily practice of choosing the unfamiliar version of yourself, over and over, until the unfamiliar version becomes the actual version, and the boxes in the corner finally get opened, and the apartment becomes home, and the new chain becomes mine.