I have found countless articles about women losing their identities, becoming anxious, riddled with intrusive thoughts, feeling alone, isolated, and unattractive after having babies.

The commonality between all of these confessionals is that they seem to be written when they are back to feeling a sense of self again, oftentimes years out. Most of these stories I am reading don't involve a diagnosis. They just involve distance from grief, enough distance to recognize their old selves again and finally understand what happened to them.

I have spent the last five years altered by hormones from pregnancies, miscarriages, postpartum periods, breastfeeding, stopping breastfeeding. Here are the specific behaviors that came up for me that I couldn’t recognize:

• Extreme anxiety regarding:

  • Talking to Strangers

  • Having open conversations with family about my feelings

  • Consumerism and consumpion. I.e. the world would end if I accepted a single-use plastic item or the bees would all die if I didn't buy organic or we would wind up homeless if I let my wife buy me something, literally anything.

  • Experiencing obsessive thoughts

  • Irrational Fears:

    —Fear of consumerism: If I bought something, I was inflicting harm upon someone else by participating in capitalism

    —Fear of soap on dishes: If I used soap on dishes, I was killing bacteria and my gut ecosystem would be altered and I would become ill

    —Fear of consuming most food items: I would often stare at food and think, “If that goes in my body, I will become ill. If that goes in my body, I have consumed something inedible.”

    —Fear of talking to strangers, especially servers: I was convinced they were all lying to me and were living some sort of facade at work to get money, that they were, in a sense, unreal. They weren’t people inside of their people bodies. 

    —Fear of deodorant: If I put on deodorant, my body would produce sweat that smelled. If I didn’t put on deodorant, my body would be fine. 

    —I stopped shaving my entire body. I stopped tweezing my eyebrows. I lost my hairbrush. I started showering maybe once a week. I told my parter that this was all normal and that this is who I was when she met me and she must have been blinded by how cute I was. Gross. 

• Isolation

  • Feeling utterly alone and desperate to be seen as not a parent.

• Self hatred, thoughts of self-harm and suicide

  • Feeling like my partner would be better off raising our daughter without me.

  • Feeling like my body might fail at any point because it was good at having miscarriages, making me think that it was my fault that we were becoming more in debt; even during pregnancy I was pretty detached from both of my fetuses. Even now, it is difficult for me to connect the beautiful children I have to their fetal forms.

• A loss of sexual and gender and self-identify, body dysphoria

  • This one is the last evil that I have been trying to work through and am not quite recovered from yet. It has been 9 months since Felix was born, and I have struggled with feeling physically unattractive for years. I used to love myself, my body, my face; Last winter, I got really upset when Christina (my wife) bought a mirror. I avoided looking at myself for years. That very mirror is the thing that made me start feeling alright again.

    • For a couple of years, I identified as queer instead of as a lesbian because I could no longer understand what being a female meant. I am back to identifying as a cis she/her lesbian.

    • I felt like the My Big Fat Greek Wedding character Toula—”frump girl”—ever since 2016 when I cut all of my hair off and stopped taking care of myself. I cut my hair off again a few months ago when postpartum shedding started, and then I found myself uncomfortable in all of my really shapeless clothes and started dressing in my femme clothes again. A few months ago, I didn't know what would be uglier to me, the hair loss or looking in the mirror to see an androgynous face again. After cutting my hair, I loved how clean I felt, and I even loved seeing my own face again. I also am happy to have it just long enough to pin back right now.

    • Related to the incubating+feeding of babies is the detachment from my former, adorable cute girl self, a sort of inability to see beyond my parenting lens when I look in the mirror. I have thought I couldn’t be cute girl AND be a parent.

    • All the hobbies I loved fell away over the years, occasionally resurfacing on a particularly good day, but mostly just buried.

• Capgras syndrome: I was convinced that my cat wasn’t really my cat, it was some other cat in my cat’s body. 

I wrote about the sudden shift I felt when Felix was born in my last post about Postpartum Depression. While my most dangerous behaviors had been subsiding for the two years prior (I was back to feeling hopeful before we started the ELEVEN rounds of inseminations to have him), these last nine months since he has been here have felt like those last few minutes of putting a puzzle together, when you’ve got about seven pieces left and you are just scrambling and excited with each last piece you click into place.

In March,

just before Felix was born, I felt inspired to start wearing my own clothes again after a visit with my friend Emilie: “At our last semi-annual caffeine gathering, she told me she loves an excuse to dress up--I said I avoid dressing up at all costs. I have been thinking, though: what about getting dressed in general? Over the last decade of my marriage, I have shed nearly all old articles of clothing and acquire a garment maybe once a year when there is some normal work function or holiday and Christina makes me get something. Generally, after Christina takes something off her body, I put it on my body, and thus, I never really get dressed. Yesterday evening, I found some of my own clothes and I feel inspired by the semi-annual (friend?!?) human to start getting dressed.”

In April,

I started creating again and wrote: “Feeling not depressed. Played guitar and fingertips sore. Thinking about the thousands of days I thought about creating something and then didn't. My how those add up over a decade. There is a baby in my bed how did that get there. There once was an art in my brain what was it. Something about feeling sad when still in the middle of the experience. Something about being loved by someone even after they know you. Something about being a rumbling, laughing chamber of food.”

In May,

I began to dance again and I wrote: “Linea nigra still there, a stream of frecklies bisecting my body. The hip and back pain post-Iris lasted over six months. Post-Felix, that pain never existed and I am considering taking a modern dance class. I know I am technically an old lady in the dance world, but every classroom needs one of those to remind everyone else that they, too, are in a state of certain necrosis. At 18, I once thought, "Shit! I don't want to be 30 and teach classes," not understanding at all the value of teaching or that dance is more than performance. After two decades of consistent training, I quit at 24 and some days miss the feeling, but not at all the obsession with how my body looked or didn't look. Life, thanks for these babies.”

In June,

I started drawing again.

In July,

I ditched my old business for organic, unisex kidswear, artwork all done by me.

In August,

I started taking care of our home again and helped rip up an eyesore room to begin remodeling.

In September,

I started to love putting on dresses and clothes that fit me again.

In October,

I began baking.

In November,

I got rid of the shapeless clothes I’d been wearing for years and only kept the things that fit me. I started thrifting.

In December,

I just felt nice. I felt okay. I did a photoshoot with a new friend and talked about recently feeling alright about everything. I started writing daily again.

It is January 2020.

Change takes time. I am trying to not regret things that happened when I was not myself myself and am trying to be thankful for the two amazing little humans that I have and the parts of my life I can still work on.