Sunday Pick: How to reclaim your narrative (w/ Monica Lewinsky) | from How to Be a Better Human

The episode opens with a clip from Monica Lewinsky’s 2015 TED Talk, “The Price of Shame.” She recalls that when the Clinton scandal broke online in January 1998, the internet displaced traditional news for a major story and she went almost instantly from being private to being globally humiliated. She calls herself “patient zero” for losing a personal reputation on a worldwide scale and describes the virtual mobs, cruel emails, jokes, tabloid coverage, and photos used to sell newspapers and keep audiences watching television. She jokes that she made mistakes, “especially wearing that beret,” but says the judgment directed at her personally was unprecedented. She was labeled a “tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo,” and “that woman,” while millions saw her and very few knew her. Chris Duffy introduces Lewinsky as an anti-bullying activist and host of Reclaiming, a podcast about people rewriting narratives imposed on them. He says her experience is unusually public, but that everyone now manages a gap between a private self and a public version presented online. The conversation will therefore examine humiliation, power, trauma, bullying, grace, redemption, and whether people choose to shame or offer others a path toward reconciliation.

When Chris asks who she is today, Lewinsky says she would rather answer with the person she is now than the person represented on Wikipedia. In her 50s, she feels increasingly comfortable with herself, describing herself as thoughtful, “fucked up,” and someone who works on herself. She says Reclaiming began as a possible book but became more interesting as conversations with other people because everyone has moments when they try to recover something lost or taken from them. She says reclaiming can involve headline-making events or tiny private moments. That morning, in a somatic therapy session, she acknowledged that she could see a change she wanted to make while also accepting that part of her was not ready yet. For someone who felt she was always running out of time because she had lost so much of it, accepting that limitation was significant. Lewinsky says an important early anchor during the crisis and the following decade was the way friends and family reflected her “true self” back to her. Without those relationships, she might not have had a stable reference point amid public caricature. She compares healing to a spiral rather than a straight line: people may feel they have returned to an old problem, but they are actually moving through it at a different level. Emotional trauma also cannot be treated like a cut with a predictable timetable; people store the same event differently in their nervous systems, so no universal list of three steps will work for everyone.

Chris asks why Lewinsky remained publicly known as Monica Lewinsky instead of changing her name and disappearing. She says that in 1999, while impeachment was ending, legally changing her name would almost certainly have become news, making it impractical. She also resisted the gendered assumption behind the question: no one asked Bill Clinton whether he should change his name. Although she initially wanted a private life, she went to graduate school in London in 2005 hoping to get a job afterward and become as normal as possible. Her college friend later teased her that normal was never going to happen. Lewinsky says part of healing meant accepting that “1998 Monica Lewinsky” could not simply be abandoned; that person had to be integrated into who she became. She went on roughly 50 job interviews without being hired, tried to start a business, and joked that being a Libra rising made her see both sides of every decision, which was not useful for running a business alone. The opportunities that kept appearing were public ones. By 2014, in her early 40s and unable to support herself financially, she wrote a first-person essay for Vanity Fair, her first public words in a decade. She describes it as an experiment: jumping in with “no fucking idea where I was going to land.” She also explains that she was denied reimbursement for her legal fees despite the Independent Counsel Act allowing people investigated but not indicted to apply. Reagan and George H. W. Bush had received reimbursement for Iran-Contra-related legal costs, while Clinton and Vernon Jordan received small amounts; Lewinsky was denied completely.

Asked how she survived the decade after the scandal, Lewinsky names several supports. Her therapist helped her see that difficulty letting go can reflect an old coping mechanism that once saved her, including dissociation and concentrating on hope. Her mother’s relentless optimism was irritating at the time—she would insist Lewinsky would eventually go outside without a hat again—but in retrospect that hope served as a beacon. Lewinsky also stopped conventional therapy for a period and began working with someone who used sound and what she calls resonance and vibrational work to heal her energetic field. She has continued that work for nearly 20 years and considers it the most pivotal intervention because it helped her “find my light again.” She also tried other approaches, including EFT, or tapping, and says she was willing to try almost anything someone recommended. Humor became another survival tool. Lewinsky attributes her gallows humor partly to her family and Jewish background, and says laughter and gratitude can shift a person’s “frequency and vibration” quickly. She recounts the story from her first major public speaking engagement, at Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Conference. After her talk, a 27-year-old man tried to pick her up with, “I can make you feel 22 again.” She considered it briefly because he was cute, but declined. Her joke in a later TED Talk was that she might be the only woman over 40 who did not want to be 22 again. Although some advisers worried the joke sexualized her, she trusted the humor that had helped her survive.

Chris asks how shame should function in a political culture where people who appear to deserve shame often seem shameless. Lewinsky cites Roxane Gay and Kara Swisher’s distinction between cancel culture and accountability culture. Some behavior requires accountability, she says, but cancel culture can become reflexive and reactive. She gives the example of people forming an opinion after reading only a headline, then joining a bandwagon without understanding the consequences of what they are doing. She agrees that shamelessness appears unusually widespread, but wonders whether society needs more precise words for different kinds of shame. Shame once helped maintain social norms, especially before mass media, but its modern forms can become destructive. Chris identifies the damaging process as piling on and turning a person into a monster. He also says “cancel culture” is sometimes used defensively by people who simply do not want to be criticized, while real dialogue and critique are harder because there are too few spaces for them. Lewinsky adds that some people become defensive because they are narcissistic, while others are terrified of the consequences of admitting wrongdoing. They also discuss unequal responsibility. People often attack the person nearby who will listen rather than the more powerful person who is accountable but ignores them. Lewinsky says public criticism should distinguish between a person who needs to make amends and a person who has merely become the most convenient target. The shared conclusion is that accountability should be informed, proportionate, and connected to responsibility rather than collective punishment.

Chris asks how young people can separate their internal identity from the public narrative written about them online. Lewinsky says people naturally try on identities as they grow up, but that it is especially difficult when online humiliation has no clear perimeter: unlike an embarrassing incident at school or a spilled glass of wine at dinner, there is no limit to who can see it. She dislikes the word “reinvention” because it suggests the earlier self needed to be discarded. She prefers maturation, evolution, healing, and integrating what came before. Much of who she is today, she says, was already present before 1998. She and Chris connect this to self-forgiveness. Chris describes avoiding his high-school reunion because he disliked his insecure younger self; Lewinsky suggests that the earlier Chris still deserves empathy because that person’s experiences helped shape his present ability to notice and include isolated people. Lewinsky describes the same integration process with the “beret-wearing Monica” and says trauma can create fellowship with others who have been publicly misunderstood. She executive produced The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox to show not only Knox’s release from prison but also the aftermath: returning to family, finding a new normal, and living with a narrative that others insist must be left behind. Lewinsky says she would absolutely erase the trauma if she could, despite the later work it enabled. She does, however, recognize that repeated disappointments have taught her not to catastrophize as much and to move forward more quickly. She defines forgiveness as something that does not excuse behavior and often helps the person forgiving more than the person forgiven, though it is best when paired with responsibility and amends. No key participant from 1998 has personally apologized, but apologies from strangers and positive responses to her work have helped repair the public-private divide for her family.