Being authentic in a superficial world

Being true to ourselves often means taking radical steps away from popular thinking and mass appeal.

Photo circa 1997: I am sitting in the front row on the left.

“The most authentic people tend to be the loneliest.”

“What you see is what you get with Jeannie,” a friend shared to someone I didn’t know well when a group of us were gathered at my close friend Rachel’s house. It was my junior year in high school, and I was feeling a certain sort of way I couldn’t name back then. In my memory now, it felt like a melange of feelings actually: loneliness, frustration, a sense of being on the outside while observing the lives of others around me. I felt lost - as I have most of my life - and strangely disconnected from myself, even then. I did not know how to conceal this, so I didn’t.

Rachel wanted to take a group photo. Everyone else (and I mean literally everyone else) present was laughing and clearly in a jovial mood. I was not. And I knew it was odd that I should feel something so contrary to the general energy surrounding me, which upset me further. I sat in the far end of the family room, quiet and brooding. Frowning, maybe scowling.

Jared (now Rachel’s husband) was the one who made the what-you-see-is-what-you-get comment. He spoke in a tone of both admiration and melancholy, if that’s possible. Maybe he sensed my perception of rejection and voiced it through the plaintive distance his tone revealed. The person to whom Jared spoke chuckled, but I did not. It felt like yet another jab in my heart, and I was exasperated of being wounded over and over.

The way I received this description of me was not as a compliment. I thought it confirmed that I was flawed, an anomaly. I thought it meant I didn’t mask my emotions well enough to fit in with the effervescence of that moment. Though I’m not sure what the context was that created a storm of sadness in me that day, I do know that I’ve never learned how to hold a good poker face, though I’ve tried. And what I’m learning is that being who we are, as we are in any given moment in time, defines a certain aspect of what it means to be authentic.

Only a few weeks ago, I listened to a friend’s voice message while pulling into my designated parking spot at my kids’ school. She was telling me a story about hiring a respite caregiver for her adult son who has autism. The woman she interviewed sounded like a promising prospect, and then my friend shared a single piece of insight her potential employee said to her: “I think the people who are most authentic tend to be the loneliest.”

The word authenticity gives me pause. It’s become a catch phrase, another one of those words we dangle loosely around our necks, like a lanyard holding a key fob. And I hate that. It frustrates me when words or phrases become trendy, lose their original connotation, and then get lost in the sea of cliches no one pays attention to anymore.

Authenticity lives easily among those tropes. “I want to be authentic,” people say, and we think we know what they mean. “You do you” is another along these lines, as is “Speak your truth.” I’ve always felt a gnawing sense that we are falling short of the truer message when we toss around cavalier statements that can’t be generalized.

But being authentic is more than just doing what feels right on a surface level. According to Dr. Grant Hilary Brenner, there are four main components to authenticity that go beyond the belief that we are “just being honest” or “being true” to ourselves. They are awareness, unbiased processing, behavior, and relational orientation.¹

In order to claim authenticity, we must first be rooted in a deep sense of self, knowing what we like and don’t like and being aware of our personality quirks and innate qualities of character. Unbiased processing has to do with how well we handle feedback from others and what we are able to do with what we receive: do we reflect on the information, or immediately brush it off? Are we defensive, or careful to consider the possibility that we might have blind spots?

Authentic behavior involves what I like to call integrity, my definition of which simply means that our values are congruent with what we profess and how we choose to live, regardless of who we are with. So, we act in step with what we’re thinking and feeling, whether we are around our mother-in-law or colleague, best friend or stranger. As we grow in authentic living, we learn how to peel away the psychological masking that may have been a coping strategy we once used to adapt to social situations that made us nervous, or even terrified. Masking is when we put on a facade in front of others to please them, to perform in a way that will garner us approval or attention, or to perfect our appearance and behavior so that we can avoid criticism.

There is a layer of humility that seems to be present when we move toward authenticity. Humility in the sense that I am able to see myself as I really am, and I am unabashed in presenting who I really am to the outside world. This is what I mean by using authenticity synonymously with honesty, as well as with humility. We have to be willing to risk going against the crowd if it means compromising what we believe in.

By humility, I mean an awareness, an admission, and an acceptance of our limitations. Recognizing that phony facsimiles of what we really want to say or how we really feel or what we honestly think actually suppress our core self. The day I forced a smile for the camera with my friends who were goofing off tells me that I didn’t know I could have given myself permission to ask for space from them, to say no to being in the photo, and to allow myself the time to process what I was feeling.

My younger brother once told me, “I always admired how you could be in a room full of one hundred people, and ninety-nine of them would choose to do something, but you would go in the opposite direction if you thought what they were doing wasn’t right in some way.” His observation caught me off guard, because I hadn’t before made the connection between authenticity and this pervasive loneliness I carried with me most of my life.

Maybe that’s what my friend’s hired respite worker meant when she said she believed the most authentic people were also the loneliest - because it is painful and arduous to see something most people overlook and to feel strongly opposed to what the populace try to convince us is good for us. Walking away from a trend with mass appeal, especially when you’re the only one doing so, can create doubt in yourself.

I think that’s why we’ve replaced the construct of authenticity with simple key phrases, like “be true to who you are.” What we mean to say is that there is an element of following one’s intuition - of trusting oneself - when it comes to living in accordance with our personal values. I can attest to numerous times in my life when my gut instinct made no logical sense, but I followed it, and it served me well.

Trusting oneself often involves risking the security of knowing how to retain a sense of familiarity. The very essence of what it means to trust is to accept a truth without any evidence to substantiate that belief. That’s risk. You can’t tell yourself or anyone else why you must follow an intuition, only that you must. And this can be frightening if you’re used to living in ways that keep you comfortable, in which you seldom attend to the still, small voice within you.

Hope for the Flowers: Maturity is an evolution toward self-acquaintance.

When I was an undergraduate student, I sought out counseling for both personal growth and for exposure to what the therapist-client dynamic might look like, in case I wanted to pursue an advanced degree in counseling. (I did, but it was in a school setting.) My then-therapist introduced me to a book called Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus, which appeared to be a cutesy picture book for children.

Rich with symbolism, I quickly realized it was meant for adults. It was a story about personal metamorphosis, using the caterpillar-turned-butterfly as its example. The main character, a caterpillar named Stripe, entered the world seeking happiness. For a time, he thought he’d found it by romping in the grass, eating lush green leaves, and growing fat and sleepy. Soon, he became disenchanted, restless. So he wandered beyond his corner of the natural world in curiosity of what else might exist beyond it.

In so doing, Stripe came upon a massive pile of caterpillars climbing so high he couldn’t see the top from his perspective on the ground. A few stragglers, who had either fallen from the pile or who were about to embark upon climbing it, told Stripe, “It’s what we’re supposed to do - climb. No one really knows what’s at the top, but there’s no time to find out. We have to just dive in!”

The caterpillar pillar from Hope for the Flowers

Stripe took little time to decide what he should do. He began climbing, though he still wondered what he was doing, and why. Before long, he stopped thinking and realized that if he were to get to the top - wherever that led - he had to push past the other squirming bodies of caterpillars who were trying to do the same. He avoided eye contact, so that he wouldn’t feel empathy at hurting anyone he stepped on.

Then, he locked eyes with another caterpillar on the tower. Her name was Yellow. She said, “Let’s climb down this pile and see if we can figure out what we’re meant to do with our lives.” Stripe protested, “This is the only way!” She sensed that wasn’t true, and somehow Yellow convinced Stripe to climb down the pillar with her and walk away from what all the other caterpillars believed was the only way to fulfillment.

Stripe agreed. He and Yellow were the sole caterpillars walking away from the massive pile of bodies reaching far into the sky. Stripe doubted this decision, but Yellow persisted that there must be something more, something better than this frenetic rush to the top. They both built a life together, but Yellow grew dissatisfied with the crawling. She wanted to fly but didn’t know it was what she was created to do.

Eventually she and Stripe separated, because he was desperate to return to the pillar and reach the top, but Yellow wanted to carve her own way, even if it meant doing so alone. At this juncture of departure, the two caterpillars sadly chose different trajectories. And this time, Stripe nearly made it to the top of the caterpillar pile when he realized that there was nothing at the top. Everyone was chasing a phantom - and they were all willing to risk stepping on each other, proving they were stronger and better and faster in getting there than the other caterpillars.

Yellow learned on her lonely path that she could transform into a winged creature. This was after stumbling upon a caterpillar spinning his chrysalis. He told her, “I’m going into this dark place so that I can develop my wings and become a butterfly. It’s what we’re all meant to become.” Yellow believed this and took the risk of spinning her own chrysalis. And once she emerged a yellow butterfly, she sought out Stripe to encourage him to do the same thing.

That’s what authenticity means. It’s about knowing when the path you are following isn’t quite right for you, even if everyone around you tries to convince you otherwise. (Jamie Varon explains this in her story about walking away from building a social media platform and returning to creating what reflected her true gifts.) You listen to your intuition and you follow where it leads you, even if that means you are forging your own way.

Because eventually, you will meet others, however scarce they may be, who are also walking this lonely road. And their experience is meant to encourage you, to apprentice you in a way, so that you can find out for yourself what it means to enter into this terrifying darkness where radical transformation takes place. And eventually you break through as one who is free to be yourself, to share what you have learned, to impart what only you can in this world.

You cannot become an authentic person if you have never learned how to become acquainted with yourself well. Maturity is an evolution toward this self-acquaintance. We learn to accept the contradictory parts of ourselves and hold them both in equal measure. The accountability to ourselves that supersedes a desire to earn validation from outside sources happens when we move toward accepting who we are instead of building pretenses of who we wish we could be.

Dr. Brenner says that “feeling like a fake can be a sign of growth, and clinging too tightly to what feels like one’s authentic self can hinder that growth.” I guess, when I was a teenager bathing in the waters of 1990s culture, I felt fraudulent being myself, partially because I was still trying to figure out what “being myself” meant. I noticed things my peers often missed: colors in specific hues, both in art class and while taking a walk outside; messages conveyed not in words but through wistful tones and eyes fixed in a downward gaze; a nervous laugh that revealed a person’s discomfort during a jovial conversation with friends.

Trying to figure out who we are is a lifetime endeavor. We don’t ever arrive at this place of self-acquaintance and remain there. Instead, there is a constant motion forward, in which we continue to learn about and accept the ways we change our minds or experience the world in different ways than in the past, and open ourselves up to the possibility that we can continue to build who we are, to construct and shape ourselves into a different version of who we are today. And we do this without striving for unattainable, lofty expectations. We do this without forcing ourselves to conform to a particular ideology or lifestyle. We simply allow our identities to unfold each new day.

The tension we feel when we are growing signifies that we are maneuvering ourselves forward, wherever that leads and whatever that means for our lives. No one can know for certain what it means for you to be authentic, except to say that you have to access what you know to be true about yourself - and then honor that, especially when it is difficult and you are the lone caterpillar spinning your chrysalis, believing without evidence that eventually you will emerge from it a winged creature.

1. Brenner, Dr. Grant Hilary (September/October 2023). “Let’s Get Real.” Psychology Today, pp. 28-31.