are you suffering some anguish?

Edinburgh reports that I am experiencing postpartum depression.

This isn’t much of a surprise, considering how I feel: as if everything is echoes of itself.

My depression is not so intense that I am a risk to myself or others. And it is not so total that I can’t feel the joy of Wilder’s gummy grin when I sing, Zoom, zoom, zoom, we’re going to the moon! Zoom, zoom, zoom, we’re going really soon!

It is, however, intrusive enough that I am referred to a perinatal counsellor for eight sessions which are covered by healthcare. In our first session, when the counsellor asks what feels heavy lately, my voice breaks. There is more heavy here than I realized, I tell her and she nods. Apparently, this is a common thing to share.

Inevitably, the counsellor asks me about self-care. We’re on a video call and I tilt the camera downward so she can see what I am wearing. When the camera levels back out, she waits for me to explain.

Getting dressed, I tell her. That’s all I’ve got right now.

Tell, she says gently. Tell me.

What the Edinburgh assessment cannot quantify is the ways in which things like grief, IVF, pregnancy, and postpartum, just to name a few, reveal the limits of your self-language. Each takes you to the borders of what you can articulate about who you are.

Each requires that you rearrange your alphabet, find new configurations for your identity. It is not so easy, this process. It is not as if you can go dig new language from the dirt out back.

When I was pregnant I realized my sense of self was stuttering. I honestly wasn’t sure what it meant to be inhabited. I did not know how to fold all that longing for pregnancy into the facts of pregnancy. I did not know where I was even going. Was it toward meeting my son? Was it toward more loss? All this uncertainty, plus a very healthy dose of rapidly changing hormones, drained me and left me unable to say how I was, let alone who I was.

But when I got dressed there was a little current of recognition. I’d do a small head tilt and nod in the mirror. I‘d take a photograph. I’d leave the house buoyed by the energy that comes from seeing someone you know.

Getting dressed has given me a tangible way into discovering a new self-language precisely because it has given me physical referents for the abstraction of expression.

From another angle: it’s a matter of taste.

Taste, as I am meaning it, is being sure of my internal judgement: I know what I like and don’t like. It’s not fettered by what others like or what I think I should like or what I want to like.

Taste is personal.*

For me, taste turns getting dressed into an act of meaning. Taste takes an outfit and makes it a coherent communication of who I am right now because taste is borne entirely from within, made of and formed by all that has brought me here.

The thing about taste, and language, and clothes, is that you almost always have what you need already. It’s just about finding a way to put things together in ways that communicate the meaning you are reaching for.

New does not necessarily mean more. Much of what has been revealing myself to me already lived in my closet. I like this because it’s good to remember that it’s not as if you’ve disappeared.

You’ve always been here. You just need to know where to look. How to say.

* I have a lot of thoughts on taste but I want to be clear that I believe at its core, taste is about the confidence of the individual to trust his or her judgement, which is the definition I offer above, and that this by extension means taste is not brought about by the influence of money / access / education. For all the will in the world, those things cannot make you trust yourself in a way that is distinctive from what is institutionalized by money / access / education. Those things may offer replicable systems for taste but they are inherently limited by their impersonality. True taste is inseparable from the individual.