When we were first crafting the pieces for Assuwa, I was moved by the mythology of Echo and Narcissus. That tension eventually became the inspiration for the Echo Ring — a piece meant to speak the heart’s desires, to preserve something unspoken, to carry what cannot always be expressed.
But as I held the ring a few days ago, I realized it had taken on a different weight — its meaning had layered. It became less about love alone and more about the identity and fragility of expressing oneself.
That reflection brought me back to the story itself, to its layers, to its echoes in literature, philosophy, and art. It was almost a meditation on identity, voice, and the asymmetry inherent in human relationships. And, I realized that Echo and Narcissus are not just cautionary figures of vanity and unrequited love; they are mirrors of the human condition, of how expression — or its absence — defines who we are.
The Mythology of Echo and Narcissus
Echo was a nymph who loved to talk and wander the woods, but she angered the goddess Hera. Hera cursed her, binding her to repeat only the last words spoken to her. Her inner life — rich, complex, full of desire — could never fully find form in language. Still, she roamed the forests, and one day encountered Narcissus, a young man of extraordinary beauty.
“Who is here,” said Narcissus. “Here,” repeated Echo, still hidden.
Curious and drawn to the voice, Narcissus invited it closer. Echo leapt from hiding, arms open, yearning for contact. But Narcissus recoiled: “Take off your hands! you shall not fold your arms around me. Better death than such a one should ever caress me!” Echo repeated, “Caress me,” and fled, heartbroken. Time passed; Echo pined, fading until only her voice remained. Narcissus, meanwhile, remained entranced by his own reflection, incapable of seeing or loving another. Eventually, resigned to the futility of connection, he whispered, “Farewell.” Echo returned his words, soft and distant: “Farewell.”
The tragedy is: Echo loses her voice, Narcissus loses his ability to see others. One is reduced to sound with no agency; the other is obsessed with an image that cannot respond. Echo fades. Narcissus collapses into his reflection.
Identity and the Fragility of Expression
Rereading this story, I thought about how the way we express ourselves shapes who we become. There’s a particular kind of restlessness that sets in when expression is blocked — no matter the medium. Whether through words, art, poetry, music, or something more private, we need somewhere for our notions to exist. When they have nowhere to land, we feel desolated and fragmented.
Søren Kierkegaard famously defines despair (fortvivlelse) as the failure to become one’s authentic self — often by not wanting to be oneself, or by living inauthentically under societal pressures. The result is existential paralysis. Both Echo and Narcissus experience it: one cannot speak her truth; the other cannot perceive beyond his reflection. Despair here isn’t sadness; it’s a slow erosion of self through absence — through being unable to express.
Hannah Arendt writes that we appear in the world through speech — not simply by existing, but by speaking. To speak is to step forward as someone, to be recognized as a distinct presence rather than a silent body. This is what makes Echo’s fate so unsettling. She is there — she moves, desires, listens, loves — yet she cannot enter the world as herself. Without authorship over her own words, she remains visible but unacknowledged, present but unreal.
This idea folds naturally into Wittgenstein’s haunting line: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If language shapes the boundaries of what we can understand, imagine living inside a world built only from repetition. Echo’s reality is narrowed not by lack of feeling, but by lack of expression. She experiences fully, yet her world cannot expand to meet those experiences. Her silence is not emptiness; it is compression — a self forced inward with nowhere to go.
Julia Kristeva helps us name what happens next. She writes about the fracture between what can be said and what can only be felt — the space where meaning breaks down, where subjectivity becomes unstable. When expression fails, something unresolved forms inside us, something that cannot be spoken yet refuses to disappear. This is what Kristeva calls the abject — not absence, but overflow. Echo does not vanish because she feels nothing; she fades because what she feels cannot be held by language.
This is why expression is never ornamental. The language we use — or the language we are denied — becomes the way we think, and eventually, the way we recognize ourselves. Expression gives shape to identity. Without it, the self begins to thin, to fragment, to lose definition. And when we allow ourselves to speak, create, or make without distortion — when we choose what feels true over what performs well — we begin to reclaim authorship over who we are becoming.
Expression in Objects: The Echo Ring
This is also why I’ve come to believe so deeply in objects as vessels. When language or feelings fail, meaning doesn't disappear. Objects can hold what words cannot. They become a vessel of expression or a small affirmation that we are seeking.
The Echo Ring emerged from this belief. A quiet heirloom of self-expression and identity. Worn on any body, without gender or instruction. Echo resists categorization, just as authentic expression does. It honors the identity and the fragility of voice.
The Echo Ring reminds us that the hardest work is often the quietest: staying true to ourselves. In it, we return to Echo herself. Her voice, faint yet enduring, reminds us that identity is inseparable from the act of making ourselves heard, whether through language, art, or objects that carry our truth. In her echo, we find that even in asymmetry, even in absence, we can claim and honor the fullness of who we are.
