Arise Stories Podcast

What happens when other people begin defining your identity before you have had the chance to speak?

In this episode, Arise Stories explores how identity can arrive already interpreted through culture, media, institutions, social expectations, and representation.

Drawing on the ideas of Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu, the conversation examines how meanings become normalised and how certain definitions gain the authority to appear natural or unquestionable. Through Taali, The Danish Girl, Tangerine, and Boys Don’t Cry, the episode looks at different ways transgender identity has been represented, classified, recognised, misunderstood, and reclaimed. Pasted text Pasted text

But the question extends beyond gender.

How often do we meet a person only after a story about them has already formed in our minds?

And what changes when we begin to notice the interpretations that arrived before the person did?

Identity is not simply something to be recognised. It is something people must also be allowed to claim.

An Arise Stories interactive story

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Arise Stories Podcast is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://arisestories.com/

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In this podcast episode, The World You Notice Is Not the Whole World, we explore how attention, memory, expectation and emotion shape the version of reality we experience.

Two people can live through the same moment and carry away very different versions of it. This episode looks at why that happens, what quantum measurement does and does not tell us about reality, and how easily one interpretation can begin to feel like the whole truth.

This is not about pretending that thoughts control reality. It is about noticing the lens through which reality is reaching you.

Listen, reflect, and ask yourself:

What has your attention been presenting as the whole truth simply because it is the part you know how to find?

Arise Stories Podcast is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://arisestories.com/

This episode explores how identity, legitimacy, masculinity, culture, trauma, and institutional power can shape who is believed, who is protected, and who is treated as a threat.

Drawing on ideas around hegemony, moral panic, and identity sovereignty, the conversation looks at the ways social expectations can become so deeply embedded that they begin to feel like common sense. It also examines how lived trauma and institutional silence can complicate public reactions to fear, accusation, and belonging.

The episode connects these questions to Borrowed Identity, the Arise Stories novel about Mara, a young woman whose sense of self has been shaped by instability, abuse, survival, and the identities imposed on her by others.

At its centre is one question:

An Arise Stories interactive story

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Arise Stories Podcast is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://arisestories.com/

In this Arise Stories reflection, we explore the quiet emptiness that can survive success. Through familiar moments at home, at work, and in the spaces between, “When Everything Is Not Enough” asks whether the part of us seeking meaning can be satisfied by achievement alone.

This episode is an invitation to value what you have built while making room to listen to yourself.

An Arise Stories interactive story

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Arise Stories Podcast is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://arisestories.com/