December 4, 2020:
I had a small ring, with a polished rectangular stone, an agate, brown and very smooth. Its smoothness fascinated me. I wanted to understand how smoothness could be so perfect. Had it been cut by a machine, or polished in some industrial way impossible for humans? No idea. I often rubbed it absently, half pondering its mystery.
Much later I wore a razor blade on a thin chain. Early Disco Era, drug abuse signal, one of the very few coy references to my own drug use I ever telegraphed to the square population. If people asked I told them it was for suicide, ha ha, a coy reference to the depression I didn't understand and from which I saw no possible exit. As a symbol it was thus a bridge between two of the worlds I was equally not at home in, Postmodernist-style, a couple of decades before I knew there was a thing people label Postmodernism.
Lastly later still I wore a single earring, rock and roll style. My ear was pierced the old school way, with needle and potato, by a very lovely French girl I adored. For a long time I wore a thin gold hoop, until years later my bestie split with me a smaller but more expensive pair she'd won in a contest. That was my emblem for about a decade.
At various times I wore a dive watch, a Mickey Mouse watch, a nurse's pin-on watch, nowadays an Apple Watch. For several years I've worn under my shirt a turquoise crucifix on a silver chain.
These trinkets plus eyeglasses are my entire history with self-adornment.