The thinking and doing and being of who you are.
I’m thinking about my authentic self, as one does on a Sunday morning at the farmers market, buying cherries and peaches and coffee in the sunshine. Everyone looks very beautiful today, maybe it’s just my mood, and I wonder if they’re all feeling like their authentic selves, right now. It’s pride month, after all—shouldn’t we all be extra proud of living as our truest and most radiant selves?
I spent the weekend meeting and being with people, as I’ve been doing a lot of during the last few months. The only advice I’ve found to consistently work to meet people and feel good about it is to be yourself. (This is why good advice is often boring—it’s irritatingly simple.) It’s easier to find and attract the right people when you’re living honestly, and it’s easier to maintain relationships when you’ve entered them as yourself.
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Authenticity has become sort of a buzz word, which gives it the opportunity to be discussed meaningfully, or to be grossly misunderstood and used to make more money. It’s like how we’d rather buy the cereal with the word “natural” in the description on the box—don’t we also want to buy products from people who are showing up as their real and raw authentic selves? As my brother pointed out recently to me, it’s always when someone tells you they’re being authentic that you doubt that they actually are. (Is it truly authentic if you need to be told that it is?)
I think the trendiness of authenticity earnestly reflects the basic truth that we all want to be seen and known and loved for who we are. We crave authenticity and genuineness for a reason—because it feels really good to be around people who aren’t trying to put on a show. It feels good to be who we are.
The questions I’ve been sitting with lately are these: is there a true authentic self we each have within us, one that we can always tap into to live from? Or is our authenticity inherently a collaboration between our brains and bodies and histories and the outside world? (I think it’s both.)
Authenticity is our birthright: we all deserve to show up as ourselves and live the life we’re here for (not one that is predestined, but co-created between us and life itself). The potential problem of fixating on authenticity comes when we cling to one version or part of ourselves and don’t let it go. (As always, the potential problem is not the thing itself but how we relate to the thing.) It is so alluring to want to hold on to what we think is us; to want to think we really know ourselves. But by clinging to a certain version of ourselves, authentic or not, we may prevent or stagnate our growth. Rather, we can treat all versions of ourselves as movements in a dynamic dance, continuously changing.
The journey back and toward the authentic self.
I think many people initially approach authentic-self-discovery by thinking about themselves. When you realize that parts of your life don’t feel good anymore, or maybe never did, it’s common to start questioning everything. Am I doing what I want to be doing? Saying what I want to be saying? Do I even like this? Do I even care?
Questioning everything can be interesting and beneficial, and it happens cyclically, throughout life. Often, change is initiated by the friction of something feeling off, and thus, self-inquiry and life analysis become necessary.
After becoming aware of the parts of you that have never seen light, or where you’re faking it, you usually start to do something about it. Maybe you stop wearing those clothes you hate or going to events that aren’t fun. Maybe you sign up for the class you’ve always wanted to try, or come clean about something you’ve been hiding. Like anything you endeavor to learn, being yourself requires some practice. It’s not always easy to just “drop societal expectations” or “let go of childhood conditioning” — you’ve gotta keep practicing confronting the truth of yourself and acting upon it, over and over and over. This, I guess we could say, is the doing of the authenticity.
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But, what we think about who we are (I am a person who has been/is) and what we do (I am a person who does) is not who we actually are. So what are we left with?
I think the authentic self is someone you are becoming and someone you already are. It is an aspect of you, and it is all of you. Authenticity is a collaboration between your inner world and the outer world; between how you express yourself and how the outer world expresses itself through you. Your authentic self is watching the moment to moment experience of your life, and it is also living it. I think all of this might be true. It also might not really matter.
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The more you practice being yourself, the easier and more natural it becomes. It’s not even that it becomes second nature—it’s that it is your nature. It’s supposed to be easy and natural to be yourself: what makes it hard is the stuff that clouds your authenticity, like pressure or obligations, or those expectations that were never really yours.
The more I live as myself, moment to moment, as honestly as possible, the less my body puts up with me faking it. When I try to go against my nature, my body revolts—my throat closes up, I can’t speak or think clearly, I break out in a cold sweat. Living as myself just involves being willing to face the truth as it unfolds, being willing to face and feel the present moment, and to allow myself to keep changing.
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Remember that you can be yourself right now. Remember that you are yourself, right now. With time and practice and a little bit of trust, the being of yourself, which includes being not-your-self sometimes, will become simply the default mode, as it was when you arrived on this earth.
Maggie