I had only just turned thirty, but I very quickly felt the weight of the left on my shoulders. When the book came out, I became known very widely and very quickly. I’m in a very different gear than I was in writing the book, when I was wearing the self more lightly, genuinely taking myself less seriously than I have in the past twenty years. Your question around book promotion is interesting. Being confused with someone else can be liberating. They force you to reckon with the fact that maybe we aren’t as unique as we might believe. Anything that softens the icy edges of identity, melts them a little bit, is going to be helpful in that. I really believe that we are not going to get out of any of the messes we’re in until we can find ways to work more robustly with others and in collective spaces. I think this has such a deep impact on how we relate to each other, how we’re able to trust social movements. Even having kids is a form of doubling the self. There are threads in the book around the doubling of the self and the self taking up too much space. The landscape has changed so much since I first started writing about personal branding in the ’90s. One of the reasons that I wanted to write this book is that I wanted to find my way back to some of the material I wrote about in my first book, No Logo. There’s a kind of white supremacy that breaks our brains, right? And it’s a particularly common experience, I think, for racialized people, who get confused with other racialized people just because they’re co-workers. I really do sincerely believe that there is something profound we can learn from the experience of being confused with others. And so I wondered: How is that de-centring of yourself going, especially in book promotion season? SM: Maybe! I think what I’ve learned from those two other Sean Michaels is one of the lessons that you get around to in the book-this idea of finding a way to de-centre yourself and let go of a certain kind of individualism.
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