Authenticity & Self-Mainenance

October 2020 

There is a version of yourself—tidied, curated, acceptable, that you carry like luggage through every room you enter. You grow used to it, of course. After a time, you even begin to believe in it: the fixed smile, the correct handshake, the careful emphasis on certain words over others. The self as presented, rather than the self as known. A habit, like any other.

No one instructs you in this performance. You learn by watching, the raised eyebrow of a superior, the delayed reply of a friend, the silence that follows an honest remark. The world teaches you what it will not tolerate. So you adapt. You assemble your identity as one might piece together a disguise: a manner of speaking here, a posture there, a borrowed opinion to smooth over the awkward silence.

And yet beneath it all, there remains the other self. The one untouched by routine or approval. You feel it sometimes—in the middle of a conversation you’re no longer listening to, or while shaving, your eyes meeting your own in the mirror and not quite recognizing the reflection. That self does not need to be admired. It does not need to explain itself. It waits, like a quiet figure at the edge of a party, observing but not engaging.

We spend years sustaining the illusion. We maintain it with appointments, obligations, and polite refusals. We water it like a garden we no longer love. We speak of progress, of personality, of being “authentic,” and all the while, we drift further from anything truly ours.

Is there is a certain exhaustion in this upkeep—a weariness that cannot be cured by rest or distraction ? The performance costs more than it returns, and still, we go on. We’re afraid, perhaps, of what we’d be without it. Perhaps that is the real tragedy: not that we lose ourselves, but that we willingly give ourselves away.

What remains is the question—persistent and impolite. Who are you when no one is watching? And can you bear the answer?

We speak often of freedom, but rarely of the price of being seen.