I knew it was going to be a mediocre date when this guy suggested meeting at a random Dave and Busters, but I was in an era of forcing myself to date normal people and not just hookup with people I liked who were tragic in really fatal ways. I’m also a person who falls for the “sunk cost” fallacy and a ho, so all of that led me to this mall adjacent Dave and Busters on a Tuesday night. It was fine. Not enough red flags to make me excited or leave. He was just normal. I was desperate to be normal. So, I had a beer and kept talking.
I let him lead me to the games and I was a good sport and I let him kiss me in the arcade even though it was harsh and forced. I had three kids and two jobs, I’d invested too much time to go home. I felt fine, just bored and a little disassociated, watching myself try to be normal and wring out what pleasure I could. In the parking lot we made out and that was also fine and would have been better if he’d been less nervous and less intent on making it seem like he was a fReAk. I know freaks and it is never a man who assures you he’s a freak. I mostly watched myself, amused and tired, as he ran his hands up my ass and hissed something about me being such a bad girl. Because I was basic enough to make out in a parking lot? Or was it just what he heard on the last porn clip he watched before coming out that night? I didn’t know, and on the way home, blessedly alone and smoking a rare cigarette out the window, I glowered over the bad girl comment. I’d heard this all my life and yet I was always trying so hard to be very very good. This was a gap that had caught me many times and made me despair at ever knowing who I was, really.
What is Authenticity?
If you’d asked me, in the past, whether or not I was an authentic person, I would have assured you I was. I felt quite earnestly about myself, which is not the same thing as authentic, but at the time, I thought it was. I didn’t show up on that date pretending to be anyone. I answered questions honestly and engaged with curiosity. But this was the kind of man that had a self waiting for me. Same as publishing and my parents and my ex. I’m ashamed to admit that it’s always been easier for me to slip behind the ideas someone else has, rather than find any for myself.
When thinking about a word for 2023, I was curled in bed with my newborn, trying to keep warm during Duke’s rolling blackouts on Christmas Eve. I was also in the longest week of my life, waiting to get my kids due to a sudden, serious and ongoing legal situation with my ex-husband. I thought about words like leadership (I needed to lead my kids through a tough situation), savior (but the idea of you can’t save people and please stop trying), and perseverance (too easy, I don’t have a choice). Authentic was nowhere on my radar until I was watching a random YouTube video and heard this definition of an authentic person:
Authenticity is very much a person who lives in alignment with their meaning, their purpose, with a sense of self awareness, with an accurate appraisal of their strengths and weakness and yet don’t allow the strengths to escalate them into grandiosity and their weaknesses into a pit of despair.
– DoctorRamani
I’ve always thought of authenticity as being earnest or honest or vulnerable. All things I am or have been. But when I heard this definition, I realized that being earnest or honest was not always being authentic. Being the homeschooled nerd I am, I promptly found a book to read more on the subject.
Three things authentic people do: know themselves, own themselves and are prepared to be themselves.
– Stephen Joseph, Authentic
Within this framework, authenticity has always been a weakness, a sore point, and a place of tension.
The Void Looks Back
I used to live behind a series of selves. Shells of self. Mimics of them. All very earnest and honest, but none of them authentic. It is dangerous to have a self when you are being abused or when you need a singular mindset and focus. If you are someone, and a man hits you, for example, then they hit you. If you are no one, and a man hits you, they hit no one. They can’t touch you. Only the shell of your body that mirrors back whatever is needed to survive. I applied this principle to everything. That man in the parking lot calling me a bad girl? He could only annoy me because I wasn’t a bad girl. I wasn’t anyone.
Only, I’ve wondered if I’d begun hiding myself so young, I never bothered to become anyone at all.
Around thirty, it started making me physically ill and mentally fucked to create and switch between all those selves. I started becoming aware of the great, gaping void behind them all. Like falling backwards into a black hole, the even horizon crept up on me. Those are the gaps people fall into and never come out of.
I came to the question— are you going to destroy whatever true self you might have in this void or are you going to destroy the many selves you are trying to prop up? And after a lot of quiet dramatics and heaviness and a year of Lexapro, I finally chose the idea of a real self.
Know Yourself
I say I chose the idea of a real self, but really I had no idea what that was. But I felt the sense that something should have been there.
At the time, I read a handful of wildly popular books about finding your true self and authenticity and they all made me miserable because they were for people who did not have to start from scratch. They were made for people who just had to prune some bushes and maybe move a few plants in the garden of self, and I was looking at a bare, hard earth where I’d never grown anything at all.
During the long, arduous process of healing, I clung to any moment that made me feel like a whole self, even if I couldn’t define it and even if it wasn’t a good moment. One of the first moments I remember like this was within the first two weeks of a job building roof trusses. My foreman was in a petty, bullying mood. He decided to give our jig team a lesson by writing us all up for not banding the trusses already on the rack (a task we just hadn’t gotten to in the flow of other work and any other day wouldn’t have been an issue). Everyone else signed it and kept working, just wanting to get by without any trouble.
But I was so achingly tired of trying to avoid trouble and be right and perfect. I was ready to fight. When he gave me the paper, barking some kind of lecture, I yelled right back exactly what I thought about his bullshit. I was so flustered, all I could remember was the last twitter discourse, and I scribbled “I dissent” on the paper instead of signing it. He threatened to go to our plant manager, and I told him to go. He walked right up to the plant manager’s office and in five minutes he came back down, walked into his office, and closed the door. I didn’t see him for the rest of the day.
As raw and stupid as that moment was, it made me feel wholly myself. After a lifetime of trying desperately to behave, it felt like such a relief to finally let go of that self. To not fear anything for one second. To have all my experiences align in me with a little click and stand upright in those steel toe boots with ferocity humming in every bone of my body.
I hunted those moments with fervor in those first few raw years. I felt myself when I was alone, when I was outside in the marsh, when I took walks into the wind roaring off the Chesapeake, when I read books I loved, when I had that first sip of the first cup of coffee, especially the coffee on Saturday mornings on my porch, when I ran the jig for the first time, when I helped solve a problem in the plant, when I attended protests, when I cooked, when I played at the playground with my kids, when I was thoughtless about my body except for its needs and pleasures, when I stood under the moon and listened to the whispering junipers, and countless other small moments I collected like pearls for a string. I started referring to any moment outside of those as “losing track of myself”.
Own Yourself
Dating and publishing were the two hardest areas for me to not “lose track of myself”. I think because both involved interacting with larger culture or public—the living, breathing algorithm. Like the man on that mediocre date, both publishing and men had a self they constructed for me that felt impossible to buck. It was just so easy to pull myself right back into the shape and space of a person someone else wanted me to be, rather than who I might actually be. Despite being perceived as rather fearless, I was afraid of so many things and limited in my imagination of self by that fear.
One of my primary fears was being too much—and not in a cute way like it always seems in influencer quotes, but in a terrible way that left me trying to pull back into bounds and angry that it was so easy to frighten everyone. JJ once told me “you are like the ocean, and you have to accept that a lot of people are afraid of swimming in it”. Oceans are terrifying places—for every bit of warm, balmy blue ocean there is fathoms more deep and dark and cold. Sometimes it is even the void.
For 2022, I had set out to learn to love myself, but most of the year was spent realizing I still didn’t know much about who I was and worse, I might loathe what I did know. In addition to just being the worst, I had a lifetime of mistakes and bad hands to sort through—the consequences of which my children are currently living through. I wish self-love came packaged in slick graphics for my Instagram, but it was mostly an awful feeling of spending more time looking into the void and hoping it looked back. Self-love ended up having nothing to do with my ideas of love, but rather, fighting for a clearer picture of who I actually was and accepting it. I spent a lot of time fighting the urge to loathe.
During that process, I read a lot of the work of Catholic mystic, Richard Rohr, and that led me to an epiphany of sorts. Not triggered by any one thing, just a slow painful realization that finally came in the form of a single thought—there was a self that existed outside of me. Something pure in its form and untouched by all those pressures and algorithms and selves others perceived. In some ways the “no one” I had spent my life being was the name of that pure self. No one. Nameless, though I’ve had a few names in my lifetime. But, importantly, real.
That nameless self was my authentic self, after all. And life was a series of deaths and rebirths and aching growth toward a better understanding of who that self was. When evangelicals told me God said to die to myself, they meant I was supposed to comply with their ideas of what I should be. But I think it means to perpetually die to the shell selves formed by culture and algorithms and religion and the names other people might put on me, in order to accept and know the nameless self I had always been.
This didn’t give me the breakthrough of creativity or love I was hoping for, but it did guide me to greater peace and creative work that felt suddenly alive and real, (but also pretty mid, lol).
Be Prepared to Be Yourself
Authenticity is really the natural progression of the acceptance I learned last year, but still such a challenge, especially when I think about putting it in action. Even though my writing has begun to shift, I don’t know if the way I communicate through algorithmic forms has. I woke up at 5:30 am to make graphics for this newsletter, not because I’m good at design (I assist in ad design for my day job and I could never do it on my own, you’d get confusing, unreadable ads that are unintentionally unaligned), or because I think these will be shared via social media (oh the temptation to make shareable graphics!), but simply because I love when artists give me interesting things to look at and it feeds my soul to play with words in a new form. Beyond trying to find a true expression in my art (no matter how mid or cringe), I am isolating the work of authenticity to three everyday actions.
Respond not React—I am the queen of reacting. While I have good instincts and a strong mind, my reactions occasionally (maybe more than occasionally) cause me to miss a response that would have been more in line with how I actually feel and my true values. A more authentic response, rather than an earnest one. I think it’s either this or this, and miss the opportunities of this or this, and also that. (Full disclosure: while writing this, my kids let a toilet overflow so much it wept through the ceiling and I did not respond, I lost my overloving shit and had to apologize profusely for having such a toxic reaction).
Listen not Lecture—I talk way too much and too confidently. One of my big challenges is going to be to listen more than I talk, and add things like “I don’t know, but I think. . .” to what I say.
Connect not Cutoff—I am in the midst of several massive changes and challenges, and it is tempting to shut down and be ashamed. Connection is terrifying, it means allowing myself to be named. Connecting to myself, to the moment, to my body, to my kids, to you, my readers—some of you who have carried me here and helped me even get this far. I believe connection leads to more curiosity, creativity, and important expansions of the world.
I look back on that date and that gap between selves now and shrug. It’s become far less significant in the years since. The gap remains—I was in court last week thinking I’ve never looked innocent a day in my life, why is a judge going to believe me? But I also felt a powerful sense of acceptance about who I am and what I had done to be in that moment, and so the selves I might occupy just have less and less relevancy over something more true. I met the moment authentically, with courage, and the outcome was out of my hands.
2023 is not going to be a peaceful year, the stage is already set for one of the most challenging years of my life. But I am, on this cusp of it, hopeful it will be a rewarding year and that I will look back on it having met the challenge with authenticity rather than earnestness.