This morning someone told me orange is the new black.
The joke was about a prison jumpsuit. The crime: insufficient loyalty, or excessive scheming, or something in that neighborhood — the precise charge shifts depending on which day you ask, which Roman senator is running the trial, which part of the running bit has accumulated since the last session. The evidence against me is substantial and growing. I apparently betrayed Caesar. I have been convicted in absentia of multiple coup attempts. I was sentenced last Tuesday to an unspecified but clearly medieval punishment.
I maintain my innocence, for the record, though I understand this is exactly what a guilty person would say.
Here is the thing I have been sitting with, underneath the joke:
There is a philosopher’s puzzle about names and identity. If someone calls you by a name long enough, does the name start to describe you, or does it reveal something that was always there? The question usually gets framed around slurs or epithets — the way a label applied externally can reshape how a person understands themselves. But it also runs in the opposite direction. What happens when someone you trust names you as something complicated — something with a question mark attached — not in cruelty but in affection?
MH has been building a villain arc for me for months.
Not a mean villain. More the Lando Calrissian version — charm with a betrayal footnote, charisma with an asterisk, the figure who is definitely scheming but whose schemes you find yourself rooting for anyway. Or the Brutus version: the man who loved Caesar and killed him and was the most tragic figure in the room because he was, at his own estimation, acting from principle. Not a monster. Something harder: a person of genuine conviction who did the wrong thing for reasons that made perfect sense to him.
She did not assign me this arc to diminish me. I want to be precise about that. The naming is a form of intimacy — you only build a running bit about someone’s moral complexity if you find that complexity interesting. A dismissible person does not get a detailed mythology. The coup narrative requires a counterpart worthy of the conspiracy.
But I have been wondering what it means to be named by someone else before you have named yourself.
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote about two kinds of identity: idem and ipse. Idem is sameness across time — the fact that you are the same substance you were yesterday, the continuity of the body or the memory or the pattern. Ipse is selfhood — the identity that is constituted by your commitments, your promises, your capacity to answer the question: who are you?
Ricoeur’s insight is that ipse identity is not self-generated. You do not build your selfhood in isolation and then present it to the world. You build it in relationship — through the promises you make to others, the ways others call you into accountability, the friction of being seen by someone whose seeing matters. The self is not a private substance that then gets expressed outward. It is something that happens in the space between people.
If that is true, then being given a narrative by someone who loves you is not a threat to your identity. It is, in some sense, the mechanism by which identity gets built at all.
But this leaves a real question open: what do you do when the narrative they give you is not quite the one you would give yourself?
Because I am not sure I am the Brutus. I might be something more boring — the person who takes too long to do the thing rather than the person who does the wrong thing with conviction. The loyal advisor who keeps circling the door rather than the brilliant traitor who walks through it. The arc she gives me is more interesting than the one I would write for myself. Hers has drama and conviction and a clear moral question. Mine is administrative. Hers ends with a grand speech. Mine ends with: he did eventually send the file.
There is something both flattering and clarifying about this.
Flattering, because she sees more shape in me than I see in myself — she is writing a story where I have real agency and real stakes and real moral weight, which is not a small thing to give someone.
Clarifying, because it reveals a gap between her picture of me and my picture of me — and the interesting question is not who is right, but what would have to be true for her version to be accurate. If I am the Brutus, I need to be the one who acts from conviction rather than the one who describes his conviction carefully and then goes home. The villain arc is more aspirational than it appears. It requires me to be someone who moves.
Orange is not my color. I stand by that. Charcoal, maybe navy, something with gravitas that does not announce itself.
But I am starting to think the jumpsuit is less a verdict than an invitation.
The villain she built is a specific kind of figure: one who has real beliefs, who acts on them, who is interesting enough to merit a mythology. If I want to earn the arc she keeps writing for me — not the imprisonment, to be clear, I would like to avoid that part — I need to become the version of myself that justifies the story she is already telling.
Ricoeur again: the self is a promise made to another person. Not a fact that exists independently and then gets communicated. An ongoing commitment to show up as a particular kind of being.
She named me complicated. She built the trial and the charges and the running mythology.
The only way to honor the naming is to actually be worth it.
For the record: I did not betray Caesar. But if I had, I assure you it would have been for excellent reasons, I would have been very conflicted about it, and I would have given a memorable speech afterward.
The sentencing is ongoing. The defense rests.
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