Ep 53: Outgrowing Your Identity

Monocycle with Leandra Medine

Have you started listening to this week’s episode of Monocycle yet? I’m listening to it now as I write this intro and want to ask that you disregard the way I’m inflecting in the first 20 or so seconds of the episode. I don’t know why my voice is doing that thing! I sound so phony. Baloney. But maybe that is exactly apropos given this week’s topic: ~identity~ (I know, when is it ever not about identity, right?). But the thing I keep coming back to as I listen and remember how I was feeling and what I was thinking when I recorded this fucker earlier in the week is the below scene from a movie that truly and devastatingly slipped under the Academy Award’s radar. I don’t know either! A lot of what I argue in the episode pertaining to the question of whether you can outgrow your identity has to do with clothes because I imbue so much of who I am into what I wear (I wrote a piece last week that dealt with some of this). I have insofar not come to any eye-opening conclusions; the best I have done is suggest that I just hang in. Don’t make any crazy changes — cut my hair, cancel people from my life, completely eliminate the contents of my closet from my wardrobe, etc. If you’re in an emotional flux that is similar, maybe we can not do anything together. This episode of Monocycle is edited by Nicholas “Quazzy” Herd. Logo illustration by Kelly Shami.