#identity

#identity

When I was 4 years old, my parents divorced, and my father moved away. I grew up thinking that my biological father was "John," but recently discovered that my mother had an affair with another man, "Allen." Allen is my biological father. This was a surprise and filled with a lot of drama, but it's gotten weirder than you'd imagine.

I lost all my contacts. My number has changed, multiple times. I am being encouraged to build upon a false narrative. A false past. A clean slate, a story that is "permissible" to move forward. With those who are less than trustworthy or truthful. No questions are allowed. I did not willingly sign up for this. My current strategy is to survive.

Ahead of his time, Bowie spoke of post-apocalyptic landscapes, of isolation, of the technological journey beyond the human realm posing the great question of our time: Is the planet going to survive? He talked of dynamiting binarism and making room for different notions of identity, while forging a deep and warm bond between those who listened to him.

At the core of violence lies emotional rupture, not only when harm is inflicted intentionally, but also when life is interrupted by forces beyond one's control. Forced displacement is one such rupture. It does not simply change location; it reshapes identity, possibility, and the nervous system itself. For those who leave home under threat, hunger, or despair, exile is not a chapter that closes. It becomes a psychological terrain carried within the body and mind.

Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, begins her memoir, The Other Girl, written in the form of a letter, with a description of a photograph of an infant in an embroidered dress. The description ends with these startling words: "When I was little, I believe-I must have been told-that the baby was me. It isn't me, it's you." (Italics mine.) 1

Last week, someone asked me, "Did you always want to be a mom?" My instinct was to say yes - but then I paused. Sitting on the floor with my 15-month-old daughter, I realized I'd never actually asked myself that question before. I'd always imagined what kind of mother I'd be, but not whether I wanted to become one. Motherhood, I would soon learn, has a way of undoing everything you think you know about yourself.

Are there people you wish you could be more like? You have goals, such as to speak up more, to stop and breathe when you get angry, or to listen with more curiosity before declaring your opinion. You set these self-improvement goals and then find reasons for not changing now, or you simply forget them. Your desire to transform is real, but your brain is sabotaging your goals.

We delve into surrealism to tell the story of a young man grappling with the freedom of his identity and social acceptance. His dreams become a dreamlike atmosphere, offering him an escape from daily oppression. Within this dream world, he encounters a recurring nightmare: the moon creature, a being that embodies everything he wishes to be in real life-free, authentic, and fearless.

Football, under French colonial rule, was built to exclude them.

Around the same time, he was turning 40, so I called to wish him a happy birthday. While we were catching up, he mentioned that he'd been eating healthier and working out consistently. Then he said something that surprised me: "I had a salad for lunch today." My brother has hunted since he was a teenager. Salad was never exactly his go-to meal.

A selection of recent paintings by Sri Lankan-American artist Shyama Golden. Born in Texas, Golden's work utilizes world-building and narrative to reveal the constructed nature of identity. The series, "Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth," exhibited at PM/AM gallery in London earlier this year. The paintings follow the idea of past lives and deaths as Golden charts her own over the past 200 years.

I hovered over the dropdown menu before clicking "widowed." I realized that next year I would be clicking "married." Though I will consider myself both "married" and "widowed" after my coming wedding, the binaries that govern paperwork will not honor this joint identity, erasing a title that I have come to embrace in the past four years since my husband's death.

Diagnosis transforms the clinical aesthetics rooted in Anastasiia Gerasymova's upbringing within a family of doctors into sculptural fashion. Anastasiia Gerasymova is a Ukrainian stylist and sculptural artist based in London, whose work often bridges fashion, art, and personal narrative. Drawing from the visual language of the medical world, precision, sterility, and the tension between care and control, the editorial reinterprets these references through styling and form.

There are some items that symbolise the gap between the person you want to be and the person you actually are. For me, that item is the leather trouser. Long the reserve of motorcyclists or try-hards (the Guardian in 2020: to buy a pair was to show the world that you were coping very badly with the ageing process), the trousers started to appear everywhere a few years ago.

Fashion image makers on our MA often treat the word 'fashion' rather loosely. We encourage that,

For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrotchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for a more elaborate and wealthy clientele she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of ennui and mild querulousness with which journalists hope to woo a time-pressed but disenchanted or nostalgic readership, Erpenbeck smuggled metaphysics, politics and history.

What's in a name? As people such as Peach, Riot and Aquaman have found, it can change your life for the better, or worse. With this in mind, we would like to hear from people with unusual names about how it affects others' perceptions of you. How has your name shaped your life? Share your experience You can tell us about how your name has shaped your life using this form.

Back to selectionEvery Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she's collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into "how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking" (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film).

Between Chaos and Control: A visual exploration that collides punk rebellion with futuristic surrealism. This editorial combines raw human vulnerability, including bruises and scars, with primal expressions, metallic distortions and digital 3D forms. Through this fusion, the series explores the tension between chaos and control, the body and the machine, authenticity and performance. It captures identity not as something fixed, but as a fluid, ever-evolving form shaped by technology and rebellion.

I remember the moment it happened - the single spark that set my body aflame. Cecelia stood behind me on the Pilates reformer and pressed her legs into my back, her hands into my shoulders. The strength of her long, lean limbs drove me into submission. Her perfectly-highlighted blonde hair tickled the back of my neck. "Connect your pubic bone to your sternum. Hold it." Her voice was deep, throaty.

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.