In my work as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, I've supported thousands of people navigating trauma, loss, and mental health challenges. But nothing prepared me for the identity crisis that followed the deaths of three of my children, Johnny, Reggie, and Miah. Each loss shattered something in me, not just emotionally, but existentially. I didn't just lose my children; I lost my sense of self.
Hayley and Helaman Perry-Sanchez put off their move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as long as they could. Helaman was accepted to Harvard Business School in 2020, and though he was excited to pursue his MBA, the Perry-Sanchezes weren't as eager to relocate to the East Coast. After meeting and marrying while they were in college in Utah - and subsequently leaving the Mormon church together - Hayley, 27, and Helaman, 29, had found jobs and built a life in Seattle.
I was volunteering in raptor rescue, monitoring eagle nests as the busy season ramped up, juggling consulting work, supporting adoption placements, writing, creating. I was showing up fully in every space except the one I lived in: my body. And yet I refused to let go. I told myself it was just a busy season. That if I could push through, things would calm down. That my exhaustion was noble, temporary, necessary.
"The wound is the place where the Light enters you." ~Rumi I didn't know what it meant to grieve a body that was still alive until mine turned on me. It began like a whisper-fatigue that lingered, strange symptoms that didn't match, a quiet fear I tried to ignore. Then one night, I collapsed. I woke up in a hospital room I didn't recognize, attached to IVs I hadn't agreed to, surrounded by medical voices that spoke in certainty while I sat in confusion.
Bodies, for Lanthimos, are ill-fitting shells. Uncomfortable carapaces. We wear them, often awkwardly, because we have to, but we're typically struggling with the urge to take them off, trade them out, or-having failed to control our own-control those of others. Bodies betray us, fall apart, stop working, or inadequately represent our true selves. Maybe, if we're determined enough, we can inhabit a different body by taking someone else's.
It starts with a tingle, a tremor, a sense that something is off. Dr. Sue Goldie doesn't recognize the symptoms at first. Maybe she ignores them, wishes them away. It is 2021. She is 59, in the prime of a long teaching career at Harvard. She has just immersed herself in the sport of triathlon. One coach notes something off with her running cadence. Another wonders why her left arm isn't fully lifting out of the water.
Part of the answer comes from optics. Violet light has the shortest wavelength on the spectrum of visible light, right next to the unseen ultraviolet, which only our skin detects. With its short wavelength and high frequency, the color purple contains the highest energy of all visible light. Figuratively, we can think of purple as the border between the visible and the invisible.
This is a novel of ideas, as well as, at its most elemental, a tangled love story. Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned. Consider the contrivance Desai brazenly concocts to enable a central moment of this story: a chance meeting on an overnight train between the two title characters after they've each rejected their own families' formal attempts to arrange a marriage between them. Dickens, himself, might have blushed.
In "Consuming Place: Women, Wine and Imagination," Janine Aujard examined how women in England and Australia experience wine drinking not just as a gustatory pleasure, but as a medium for engaging with place, memory, identity, and imagination. She frames wine consumption as a cultural practice that allows women to "consume" spatial and temporal dimensions. In effect, they are drinking more than wine: They imbibe ideas of place, belonging, and time.
As a Japanese man born and raised in the United States, Kitamura said he struggled with imposter syndrome. Though he was part of a Japanese tattoo family, apprenticed to a Japanese tattoo master, and works with primarily Japanese-American clients, he worried that his own style was Americanized compared to the traditions he was studying. Now, nearly 29 years into his own practice as a tattoo artist (Kitamura opened his own studio, State of Grace Tattoo, in 2002 in San Jose) he feels "This is me accepting who I am and being proud of that," he said.
I know I mentioned my profession to him, but I am pretty sure he was the one who engaged me that way. I also know how diabolically good a chatbot can be at saying what is on the tip of your tongue, and doing it before you can, and better than you might have. That makes me feel less troubled by my uncertainty.
Bear's Nap by Emily Gravett, Two Hoots, 12.99 Someone is cheeping and keeping Bear from sleeping in this increasingly uproarious picture book filled with forest-dwelling creatures and their noises. A joy to read aloud. This Is Who I Am by Rashmi Sirdeshpande, illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane, Andersen, 12.99 A moving celebration of heritage and identity, this softly coloured picture book follows a little girl with a foot in two worlds, who is both the richness of all the worlds she belongs to and uniquely, proudly
Characters in the "Alien" franchise have always wrestled with identity crises. Whether it's human beings trying to transcend the limits of their finitude through interstellar travel, or synthetic machines passing themselves off as humans, there's always a disconnect with one's baseline identity that drives protagonists and antagonists alike. "Alien: Earth," the first television series set in the franchise and set two years before Ridley Scott's original film, continues this existential tradition but through the experiences of two new entities.
Howard Atelier introduces Chapter One: "The Facade You Wore," a collection that reimagines the hat as a sculptural mask, rooted in the language of performance and concealment. Each piece inhabits the liminal space between public persona and the private self, dissolving the distinction between wearer and observer. Through streamlined designs, the collection probes the tension of identity: the interplay of anonymity and expression, exposure and secrecy.
Vlaemsch (chez moi) is Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's love letter to his native Flanders. Like so many love letters, it's full of anger, pain and recrimination. Its tone is by turns overblown, infuriated, accusatory, ironic and tender. It is, nonetheless, a love letter in the guise of a piece of dance-theatre. Cherkaoui's background is as complex as that of his native Flanders. He was born in Antwerp, the son of a Moroccan father and a Flemish mother;
Two months after moving to London, I received the offer I had always dreamed about: I would work in news publicity at the BBC. I couldn't believe my fortune. It was one of those "pinch me" moments that made all the sacrifices, visa paperwork, and career risks feel worth it. I had grown up watching the network from across the globe and imagined what it would be like to walk the halls of such a prestigious institution.
The Special Presentations description at TIFF is as laconic as it is cogent: "High-profile premieres and the world's leading filmmakers." The films in this dispatch boast star all-star casts and tell coming-of-age stories of a sort, but they're really stories about people who have to accept parts of themselves they'd rather keep hidden, and begrudgingly accept ways community can help ground them while all else spirals out of control.
The capsule wardrobe concept, popularized in the 1970s by Susie Faux, proposes an exercise in synthesis: a compact set of versatile pieces, capable of combining in countless ways to suit different occasions. In visual culture, there are a few metaphors for this: in cartoons like Doug Funnie or Dexter's Laboratory, opening the closet revealed rows of identical clothes, ready to simplify life (and, in the case of animators, the work).
Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon's brilliant nonfiction book about parenting children different from oneself, offers the useful distinction between vertical and horizontal identities. Vertical identities are inherited a family name, an ethnicity, or a nationality; horizontal identities are qualities that define us which parents may have nothing to do with, such as the kinship people with autism feel with one another, or being gay or deaf.
Using the genetics of someone you don't know to help you build one of the most intimate relationships in your life can be very difficult. It can generate feelings of loss, worry about being accepted by others, fear of others not accepting your children, concerns about bonding, and more. These feelings do not need to be resolved to parent. They need to be accepted, and they often need time.
Sophie Green documents the culture on her doorstep; she's fascinated by who - and what - makes British culture, and its "layered, joyful, and often quietly resistant" communities. Sophie's new book, Tangerine Dreams, is the culmination of a decade of documentation, covering Aladura Spiritualist congregations, modified street car communities, marching bands, dance troupes, British cowboys, dog shows, horse racing fans, Peckham afro hair salons, and Irish dancers.
