Does your 'personal brand' allow you room to change?

Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, didn't want to brand herself.

In Doppelganger, she wrote:

"Good brands are immune to fundamental transformation. Conceding to having become one at age thirty would have meant foreclosing on what I saw as my prerogative to change, evolve, and hopefully improve. It would have locked me into performing this particular version of me, indefinitely."

Furthermore, journalism and analysis "rest on a tacit commitment to following one’s research wherever it leads, even if that turns out to be a very different place from what was originally expected. Trusted analysts have to be willing to be changed by what they discover." So, while "good branding is an exercise in discipline and repetition" that requires "knowing exactly where you are headed all the time," unfortunately for those who care about intellectual honesty and personal growth, this motion "is essentially in concentric circles."

— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Similarly, Klein wrote in this book: "From the start, I made a conscious decision in my work neither to describe raising a neurodivergent kid in any detail nor to discuss the merits of the labels that a doctor, who spent two hours with him, chose for him when he was four. A bit like a personal brand, defining T. in those ways would fix him at a single point in time and through the eyes of others. The decision about when (and if) to share his private world are T.’s to make."

I briefly compared gender to a personal brand: "Tell Us As You Write Your Story: What You Know and Can Act On". It's a 4-minute read on Medium. Consider a paid membership on the platform.

Elsewhere, I've written that I didn't feel I had space to grow in one gender, and I picked a different category that I felt had room for me. If one's gender is a brand, for me I wanted a room to expand in, not a room to constrain me.

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"Seeking some way to acknowledge the past embedded in my name without continuing to honor it, I recalled the philosophical strategy of putting a word 'under erasure.' It was a technique popularized by the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who argued that certain words contain their own negation, which he signified by crossing them out. Such words, he suggested, are unavoidable tools for speaking and thinking, but they are also inadequate. As such, they had to be eliminated while also remaining legible."
"My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it."
I needed a way to reject my family’s role in the history of slavery without denying it.
Perspective by Baynard Woods. Washington Post. July 8, 2022.