Vox Meditantis

Sunday, 30th November 2025

My two favourite things to wear, if I answer without hedging, are the consulting‑room jacket that turns me into Dr Bennett and my mother’s teal scarf, which insists I remain Catherine as well. The difficulty, as ever, is admitting how much of my life has been spent inside the first, and how recently I’ve allowed the second out of its drawer.

This evening, leaving the Victorian house near the harbour where I have spent most of my adult life listening to other people’s stories, I caught my reflection in the glass of the front door: the well‑cut dark jacket, the sensible shoes with just enough heel to sound authoritative on the floorboards, the familiar outline of someone who knows what she is doing. The jacket is not especially remarkable – mid‑price, good fabric, pockets deep enough for keys, pen, emergency tissue – but the act of putting it on each morning has become its own mild induction: shoulders back, breathing steadier, spine remembering what it is to hold boundaries for an hour at a time. Underneath, there is usually something softer, but the jacket is what patients first register; it is my unspoken contract that their chaos will meet a certain structure. Tonight I kept it on longer than made sense for a Sunday – an extra clinic carved out to see two people who couldn’t face another week on a cancellation list – and felt, when they had gone and the notes were written, the faint after‑buzz of having worn authority for longer than my nervous system strictly enjoys. I hung the jacket on the back of the consulting‑room chair, where it slumped in a way I never allow myself to in front of anyone, and only then noticed that my feet hurt: apparently competence is slightly too narrow at the toes.

The scarf is another matter. It lived for years in the upstairs room that has been quietly impersonating a museum of my parents – folded among my mother’s other bright remnants, smelling faintly of a perfume the manufacturer has long since retired. I used to open the drawer, register its presence, and close it again, as if actually wearing it would constitute some small vandalism of her memory. This autumn, without fanfare, I began looping it around my neck on cold mornings, at first only for solitary harbour walks and then, more daringly, for company. On Friday, when David and I traced the harbour’s circuit in that sharp wind that makes conversation come in gusts, I had the scarf wound clumsily over my coat; he only said, “Good colour,” in the offhand way of a man noticing a present‑tense choice rather than a relic, and I realised I’d been braced for a comment about sentimentality instead. It is not an elegant garment – the wool is a little pilly, the fringe uneven where she once caught it in a car door – but when I knot it in the mirror my face rearranges slightly, some mixture of her curiosity and my father’s wary steadiness. It is the thing I’ve started reaching for when I am walking to meet David or heading to the museum meetings, occasions where I’m trying to arrive as myself rather than as a professional emissary with a brief.

Of course, what I have really spent decades wearing is not cloth but role. I have never owned a literal white coat, yet there is a version of it that settles over me whenever I step into the consulting room: the expectation that I will know what to ask, how to keep an hour from spilling over, how to bear witness without collapsing into the story. The jacket and the shoes collaborate with this; they signal that the doctor has arrived, even on a Sunday evening when the rest of the city is already in slippers. The other garment, less flattering, is the invisibility cloak of busyness – the layers of appointments, emails, committee meetings and carefully curated crises that allow me to move through days as a necessary person, never quite still long enough to be properly seen. Today’s little technology experiment – three hours with the phone off and the browser dark – stripped away one layer of that cloak, and I discovered how often I have been using the flicker of a screen as a kind of accessory, something to fuss with instead of tolerating my own unoccupied hands. Without it, I found myself straightening the row of coats by the door, re‑buttoning a cardigan that didn’t need re‑buttoning, realising that busyness has been less a schedule and more a costume: proof that I belong here, that I am doing enough, that any loneliness is simply lack of time.

There is, lately, a new and somewhat disconcerting habit: going out “under‑dressed” psychologically. To the museum planning sessions, for instance, I have been turning up in ordinary jumpers and that teal scarf, rather than the neutral armour I’ve historically worn to boardrooms and committees. Maggie introduced me to the curator this week as “Catherine, who knows about how people actually feel in spaces,” which is not a job title one can hide behind; it left me standing there in my ordinary knitwear, trying not to reach for the invisible badge that says “Consultant, Do Not Engage Emotionally.” The sanctuary corners we’re designing for the Port Museum – benches, soft light, clear signage about permission to sit or leave – are meant to offer visitors somewhere to take their heavy feelings without shame, and it would be faintly farcical to argue for that sort of hospitality whilst turned out in full professional mail. Likewise with David: the evenings that have felt least like performance have been the ones where I’ve arrived in whatever I happened to be wearing when the day ended, hair imperfect, jacket perhaps swapped for a cardigan but not for something I’ve rehearsed myself inside. There is a particular terror in that kind of dressing: if someone sees you as you are in your ordinary layers and finds you wanting, there is no comforting story about having “not made an effort” to retreat into. Yet there is also, I am discovering, relief – the way my shoulders sit lower when I’m not trying to hold in my stomach and my history simultaneously.

So tonight’s small ceremony of undressing and not‑quite‑redressing felt like a quiet end to the week. After the last patient left and the notes were finally complete, I took off the consulting‑room jacket and left it on the chair, shoes tucked neatly beneath, as if the role itself were staying behind to rest. I kept the softer layers: a worn black jumper and my mother’s scarf, still warm from the hours it had spent around my throat, still faintly carrying the scent of the roast I’d cooked between sessions. I turned the phone back on but left it in my bag, resisting the reflex to pad the walk ahead with messages, restaurant reviews and weather apps. Outside, the harbour air had that metallic cold that means winter has stopped asking permission; Tom was just locking his front gate, Marcus was wiping down tables inside the darkened café, and the lights along the river looked more like lanterns than decoration. I walked up towards the corner where David and I had agreed – loosely, almost carelessly – to meet for a bowl of soup if neither of us lost our nerve to tiredness. No carefully chosen dress, no audition of three different coats, just the same clothes I’d worn whilst listening to other people’s pain, plus one scarf that once belonged to a woman who believed in stepping out even when her feet ached. It occurred to me, crossing the street, that this may be the winter that requires less polish and more plain attendance: fewer costumes, more continuity of self. The work jacket can wait on the back of the chair; tonight I am going out in what I am already in, trusting that it might be enough to keep both of us warm.

Catherine

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.