Identity is a Prison.

What my dad’s sudden death last month, Tim Ratliff from White Lotus and the "Remi Bader Betrayal" taught me about identity’s invisible cage.

I deplaned from JFK and arrived at LAX for what I thought would be a 48-hour work trip to my hometown, threw my duffel into my mom’s trunk, shut the passenger-side door and blacked out as she told me softly, “your dad is in a coma.”

I spent the next four days in and out of his healthcare facility, trying to piece together what happened. I interrogated his nurse like I was Olivia Benson on coke, collected his medical files, and used his phone to contact acquaintances and friends that saw him last, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

My father was only 67. A loud, painful declaration kept ringing in my ear with every passing minute, with every conversation: this shouldn’t have happened.

But to make sure I had all the right information, and to put him to rest, I had to do something I had fantasized about since 2010, since the moment I innocently went downstairs to print something for school. Since the afternoon I saw Her name pop up in his email inbox from the desk of his dark, musky office. Since the moment I found the perverse, gut-wrenching betrayal that would change my life, and my family’s life, forever.

The day after the incident that caused my father’s coma, I met Her for the first time. The woman he left my family for 15 years ago. The person who helped him blow up his life, leave his minor son, 18-year-old daughter, and devoted wife in the dust. The human being who, with her actions - not her words - said, “you don’t have to be a Father anymore. You don’t have to be a Husband. You can live here, for free. You can drive my car, for free. You can cook. You can eat. You can hide from the world. You can erase Who You Were, and become Someone New. That Identity you had before? It’s over. And here, surrounded by hand-made quilts, shabby-chic decor and aquamarine-painted furniture, it will melt away. And you will become Nothing.”

—

My father, a brittle Type One diabetic with two kidney transplants, fell into a hypoglycemic coma on March 19th. He was dead by March 22. I won’t go into the details of what happened at the facility, because The California Department of Public Health is still investigating, and it’s also not the point of this piece.

This piece is about Identity. It’s about how we claim it, why we erase it, and what happens when other people tell us who we are, against our will.

The days between March 19th and March 29th, when I flew back to New York, were a blurry, busy, swirly nightmare, punctuated by periods of immense focus - on gathering records, on sifting through my dad’s stuff at Her house, on vetting lawyers - and by periods of serious disassociation. There were many hours any given day where I felt like a character in Severance, rotting in the bath, pulled into various Tik Tok wormholes that let me forget what was going on, or why my eyes were so puffy.

Earlier in this timeline, I was feverishly tracking White Lotus theories, noticing I was drawn to Timothy Ratliff, another dad with an identity crisis. If you’re not familiar with the show, here’s all you need to know in one sentence: man of business and political prestige goes to Thailand with his family, and while there, his lawyer calls to tell him that the FBI has uncovered his massive fraud, and he’s going to lose everything. Tim is left reeling: who is he without his money, his status, and his standing? Many online perceived Tim as some greedy villain, but in the throes of my situation, I thought, “at least he actually wants to provide for his family. At least he committed those crimes to make money for them all, to put food on the table, charge expensive resort vacations on the credit card.” Must be nice!

Tim, realizing he’s fucked.

Where everyone else seemed to lack sympathy for this character, I developed a soft spot for Tim, or Tee-yaaaam, as his wife Victoria would pronounce it. Because to me, the jail cell that awaited him post-Thailand was just a physical manifestation of the cell he already lived in. His famous, household-name father and grandfather, his money-hungry wife, his community, his talentless, flaccid children - they created the invisible cage he’d been living in for years. Timothy Ratliff’s undoing this season, and wanting to murder his entire family, has less to do with worrying they won’t survive their ensuing downfall as a unit. He wants to kill himself, and kill them, because they put him on a pedestal, projected their needs and expectations onto him en masse, like he was Superman, and openly claim they cannot function unless he functions at his highest capacity. He resents them. He resents the transaction. He finally sees his invisible prison cell, and wants to annihilate his captors.

Tim Ratliff is what happens when you construct your Identity with co-conspirators who leech off of who you become, but who sacrifice nothing along the way. Later in the season, Victoria, sensing that something is off with Tim at work, complains to him that she’s always loved nice things and does not have it in her to be “poor.” She’d rather die. Saxon, also suspicious, tells Tim that he’s put all his eggs in his dad’s basket, and that if Tim’s life and business are in bad shape, so is Saxon’s. “I don't have any interests, I don't have any hobbies. If I'm not a success, then I'm nothing. And I can't handle being nothing,” he says. This entire family put the weight of their every need on Tim Ratliff: their lifestyle, their success, their self worth. Their expectations of him go beyond paternal love and care, and he knows it.

A few days before I left LA and the haze of death and mourning, I got sucked into the Remi Bader drama, too, where internet strangers ripped her apart for finally admitting that she got weight loss surgery to address her severe health issues, improve her self-acceptance and relieve her physical discomfort. As

Mikala Jamison

eloquently explains in her recent piece on the subject, “Conneely-Nolan wrote in the Chronicle article linked above that, ‘No one cares that she lost weight; it’s about the lack of transparency.’ I beg your pardon, but be so fucking for real right now.”

From what I gathered while pruning and feverishly swiping away, people got pissed that Remi built her platform off being plus-sized, doing realistic clothing hauls as a size 14-16, got dramatic weight loss surgery in late 2023 without telling anyone until now, and kept posting to social in the interim. What Mikala Jamison addresses so perfectly, that I’ll give a quick reframe, is that she built her platform while being plus-size, not off being plus-sized, and to me and Mikala, there’s a huge difference.

As Mikala writes, in various interviews and in her own Tik Tok videos, Remi openly says she “never asked to the be the face of a movement” and that she doesn’t "like being called body positive.” She also “openly talk[ed] about being unhappy with [her] body” and the various health problems her weight was causing her. I did an hour’s worth of Remi research during one of my Severance bath-time episodes, and it grew clear to me that throughout her influencing career, she represented herself authentically: as a jovial, hilarious, honest woman who openly struggled with her weight and her confidence, but who felt shoved into a prescribed “Identity” - another prison cell - by the followers who sought salvation in her shine, in her climb, and in her image.

“And now,” Remi tells The Cut in 2023, pre-surgery, “I’m also thinking about my followers — what would I do if I lost all this weight? Or if I gained more? It’s about me, but it’s about everyone else, too.”

Mikala writes about how “relying on someone else’s body and behaviors to help you feel good about yourself will probably break your heart,” and as someone who also lost a significant amount of weight, she cautions against judging other people for their bodily autonomy, or why they choose to pursue intentional weight loss. And she’s right. But I’m here to go a little further, and be a little less gentle, and say that the people who are coming for Remi, attacking her, and acting like she owed you anything are fucking deranged.

Why does this get me so heated, though? Why, watching Remi get ripped to shreds mere days after my dad just died, did I want to hit up Custom Ink for 10,000 “I SUPPORT REMI” crop-tops?

TY Custom Ink <3

Probably because I didn’t want to process my own situation, yes, and probably because I felt, and I feel in my bones, that you do not get to prescribe someone’s Identity. You do not get to build someone else’s prison cell. You can’t turn an influencer into a Body Positive Influencer against her will. You can’t make her a Confident Plus-Size Model just because you want her to be. And caging people like this, and then destroying them for their acts of agency - when these acts have no real impact on your lived, daily life, but have such a serious and positive impact on the “offender’s” - is laughable to people like me who know what real Betrayal is actually like.

She’s not your friend. She’s not your sister.

She’s not your dad.

—

Let me show you what real Betrayal actually is.

Thinking about Tim and Remi, I dragged myself back to Her house to go through my father’s storage unit in the backyard. It’s where, 15 years ago, he moved everything out of our family home, and his office, and parked it away forever. Opening up the unit, everything was covered in cobwebs, dust and mold: framed pictures of me and my brother, awards he and my mom won for the business they built together, hand-written cards I gave him on Father’s Day, CDs of music and concert DVDs he and my brother used to play together.

The unit

Inside.

Since 2010, when my father abandoned us and disassociated from his role as a parent to an eighteen-year old-girl and a 13-year-old-son, I wondered what mental gymnastics he was doing to keep his Old Life and his New Life with Her so compartmentalized. My father was quite passive during my parent’s marriage, but during and after my parent’s divorce, it was like he got Tim Ratliff’d: he wanted us gone. He wanted us dead. Or at least, dead in spirit.

The storage unit was a jarring, gut-wrenching, physical manifestation of what he did in his mind. He packed us up and shoved us away, never to revisit the Glory Days or the Good Times. He let the photos and memories of us rot in there, while outside, in real life, he actively ruined us with whatever power he could muster.

I prefer not to go into details, but his behavior ranged from outright verbally and mentally abusive to completely MIA and negligent. He could not leave peacefully. He could not, as Taylor Swift would put it, “go with grace.” He had to burn it all down. He destroyed us financially. He used his words, so venomous and pointed, to make me feel worthless. He did the same to my brother, when inspiration struck. He decided he wasn’t our Dad anymore, he was something else. He was…a destroyer. The destroyer of Michael, our father. And what or who replaced it? I still don’t know.

Going through all this for ten days - meeting Her, sifting through his stuff, walking through the storage unit - Tim helped me understand.

“He finally sees his invisible prison cell, and wants to annihilate his captors.”

Holding a moldy baby picture of my younger brother in one hand, and a dusty family photo in the other, I at long last accepted that my dad never wanted to be my Father.

Wanting love, acceptance and support from him was not much. My mother was no Victoria Ratliff. And Ben and I - no Saxon. But to my dad, that’s what it felt like. All we wanted was parental care, but even that was too much. It felt like, or at some point started to feel like, pressure. Something snapped when I turned 18 and he knew I’d be leaving the house. He saw an escape hatch: an opportunity to feel unburdened, and uncaged, with Her.

My dad chose his Identity as a Father when he married my mom and impregnated her with two children. He owed us that Identity. I will never feel otherwise, and a sense of betrayal will always linger. But I can also accept, with a deep sense of grief, that living that Identity caged and destroyed him in ways I will never understand.

Loading my mom’s awards and the guitars she gifted him into her car, I weirdly thought of Remi. I thought of this woman, who showed up honestly about who she was, who she wasn’t, and what she could give - something my dad never did. I thought about her Identity, and how painful it must be to be projected on by so many people all the time. Remi chose her Identity as a person who struggled with her weight, her confidence, and her health. It is her right what she posts online, and how and when she discloses private and personal details regarding her body. Being cancelled and attacked and bullied relentlessly because of the Identity other people assign to you is a doozy, and for those who feel truly betrayed by her, I hope you do some introspection.

Because your Identity will cage you, too, whether it’s the one you choose, or the one people choose for you.

You will always be expected to behave in certain ways based on the real-life titles you’re lucky to collect in your lifetime: Mother, Father, Son, Sister, Brother, Friend, Business Partner, Godparent. And sometimes, as in the case with Tim Ratliff, people might expect too much of you, hoping you’ll bleed to serve their aims. You will be imprisoned by this, if you aren’t already. I was imprisoned as a Daughter, wasn’t I? Do I give unconditional love to the man who made me, but who hurts me, but is also severely sick? I could never quite figure it out, but I tried.

You will also be jailed by projection. In fact, you already are. We all are. You will be judged, assessed, measured and assigned value based on your looks, your job, your social media, your friends, your success, your clothes. It’s true. I wish it weren’t, but I don’t make the rules. Just like Remi was, you too could be a victim of projection at any moment. Your friends, family, community or following expect you to go North, and you go South - because you have agency, and because it’s your God-given right. How would you feel if that right was challenged? How would you feel if a hoard of people decided to prosecute your entire Identity because of it?

—

By late March, I was back in New York. I was no longer having intermittent thoughts of Remi or Tim. Instead, I was thinking about the song I found on my dad’s Apple Music, the one he was listening to the day he slipped into a coma. It’s the song my brother and I played and sang for him at his funeral, “Can’t Get It Outta My Head,” by his favorite band, Electric Light Orchestra.

Bank job in the city

Robin Hood and William Tell and Ivanhoe and Lancelot

They don't envy me, yeah

Sitting 'til the sun goes down

In dreams, the world keeps going 'round and 'round

And I can't get it out of my head

No, I can't get it out of my head

Now my old world is gone for dead

'Cause I can't get it out of my head, no, no

I like to think it was us, me, my mom, and my brother - what he couldn’t get out of his head.

Talk soon,

Ali 🧘‍♀️