Identity Issues
5 minute read
I stand in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom. I hadn’t intended on stopping to look at myself but as I legged it past on my way from one job to another, I caught a glimpse. I work in the basement of our house and when I come up for five minutes a couple of times a day to boil the kettle or use the loo I multitask and grab a pile of washing or throw a chicken in the oven. Today was a laundry run. I was trying to separate whites from darks in the time it took my coffee to brew and I was running at warp speed. Or I was until I saw something unsightly in the mirror and realised it was me.
It’s been a strange couple of years and I’m not just talking pandemic strange. In 2018 I had my first daughter. In 2019 I decided not to return to my full-time job as a magazine editor. Since then I’ve worked for myself, had another daughter and moved house to this one, where my office is in our windowless basement.
I used to dress for my job and in some ways that fashion defined me. There were clothes I wore specifically for outdoor cover shoots, clothes for meetings with advertisers, clothes for launches or interviewing celebrities. I still interview celebrities, but I do it on Zoom and the other night I put a velvet blazer over my pyjamas in an effort to look professional. My definition of ‘professional’ has clearly changed in three years.
My work now is a mix of things. I interview fascinating people for newspapers and magazines, I ghostwrite books and I’m working for a start-up tech company. I’m different things to different people and no two days are the same and I love that. I have a different relationship with work since I set up on my own and it no longer defines me in the way that it used to.
But without the clothes and without the job title I find that I’m having something of an identity crisis. When I didn’t go back to full-time work in 2019, I had a small baby and not much capacity for thinking about myself. I had my second daughter as the pandemic hit and no one had any capacity for anything but survival. As we emerge from all that I, like so many women I know, find myself at a crossroads. Working from home is great, until you realise the amount of multi-tasking you do each day. My brain is thinking about work but also about drop-offs and pickups and daycare and dinner and the wash that’s been left in the machine slightly too long.
Flexible working is great everyone says, so good for families, except that it’s been shown now that women opt for it in numbers far greater than men and effectively end up doing two full-time jobs side by side. It also means that women disappear from networking opportunities and from office life.
I have felt that disappearance of self. As I morphed into mother and then Jack of all trades, I found myself becoming invisible. I have turned down invitations. I have avoided old colleagues and friends. As I struggle to figure out who I am now I find it easier to shy away from spaces where I’ll have to talk about myself. The pandemic was actually a convenient aide in hiding away.
Motherhood, turning 40 and a pandemic are great ways for a woman to lose sight of her own identity and I had hit the jackpot of all three in three years.
I saw it happen almost as a spectator. I watched as I chose the activewear and threw my hair into yet another mum bun. I sat on the sidelines as I bought everyone in my family new clothes but threw on an old reliable because I couldn’t even begin to fathom what to buy myself. I had front row tickets to the flannel face wash and go routine that was contributing to my increasingly dull complexion. I flicked passively through Instagram watching as women of my own age showed outfits and makeup and thought ‘sure where would they be going?’
I have been a witness to my worldly withdrawal. When I couldn’t figure out who I was, what to wear or how to do any of it I just removed myself from the situation. My family, my work and my age are not the whole of me, and I miss who I was. I stood in front of the mirror that day as if it had finally been wiped clean and I could see myself again. Standing there in my leggings, jumper, slipper combo with dry shampooed hair on the top of my head and an arm full of dirty laundry I decided that enough is enough. It’s time to emerge from my cocoon, perhaps not as a beautiful butterfly but at least as someone who has realised that they don’t need a fancy job title or youth to define them, which I’m happy to admit is some major personal growth.
I have some lovely clothes, most of which haven’t seen the light of day since about November 2017. I’m going get them out and wear them. All I need now are some invitations. Does anyone want to meet me for coffee?
Jennifer Stevens, October 2021
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