Being Your Authentic Self and Resisting Definitions

“About hope, I am somewhat at a loss. It is so easy to say I hope to—the tongue slides over it.
I think perhaps hope can only be realized by contrasting it with despair. And I am too lazy to despair.
Please don’t visit me with it, dear Lord, I would be so miserable.”
—Flannery O’Connor

I want to write a story about hope. Hope, not fear. Hope, not despair. Hope, the antidote, the holy grail, the magic potion.

Hope, the truth.

But what is hope without its opposite?

A woman is merely surviving. She’s telling herself she’s okay, that things will get better. She’s telling herself she’s trapped, that too many days have passed in exactly the same way. She’s bored. She’s tired.

Her old tricks don’t work. The definitions seem outdated. Perhaps she needs a new dictionary. Maybe she should learn a foreign language.

One afternoon, she sits on the back porch on a warm summer day, the light playing in the trees while the sun waves overheard. Suddenly, the floor falls from beneath her. Suddenly, very suddenly, it’s dark.

She wonders what is true. She asks anyone who will listen, What is real?

The world is a shapeshifter, and there’s a shapeshifting thing inside me, she thinks. Then, another voice: What can we do?

**

On an early summer day, I picked up Andy Crouch’s Strong and Weak, remembering its discussion of authority and vulnerability. According to Crouch, authority is your capacity for meaningful action; vulnerability, your exposure to meaningful risk.

This idea of authority had become increasingly interesting to me before I picked up Crouch’s book, especially as the world shifted, seemingly without me. I felt an urgency to move forward. Toward what—I don’t know.

But authority felt like an old friend who’d long-ago abandoned me. I could remember it but couldn’t find my way toward it.

Vulnerability, on the other hand, felt too close. I bought all the vulnerability rhetoric hook, line, and sinker—it’s an antidote to shame, it’s how we are known. This defined me, then swallowed me. But the risk wasn’t meaningful; it was just risk. It wasn’t balanced with any sense of authority. Even the meaningful actions I took felt hollow.

**

I started small. Every day, in my journal, I wrote the question: What is my meaningful action today? Most days, the answer was to love my husband and kids, to listen to them and help them. My most meaningful action was to connect.

Then I let everything else go.

**

Here’s what I want to talk about: hope, goodness, beauty. I want to be my best self, my higher self, the one who can zoom out and wisely pinpoint what’s going on. I want whatever self shows up today to be the one with capacity for meaningful action.

All these questions of who I am and who I want to be, these multiple selves I carry with me. The old and new. The true self and the less-than-true self. The rebel and the pleaser. The ever-changing, ever-resisting-definitions self.

What’s more true than saying all these selves are here within me?

What’s truer than our multiplicity?

Maybe that sounds like a copout or somehow duplicitous and inauthentic. We’re told to be consistent, unwavering. We’re told to be on brand, as if human beings aren’t always growing and changing, fluctuating between these selves inside us.

Perhaps we’re not meant to be the same to every person we know. Maybe we need people to know us differently, to know certain parts of us but not others. Some to be close and others at a distance.

**

On a sunlit porch on a summer afternoon, two people are parsing out the course of their lives. They are arguing. They stand up and shrink back. They ask questions and fear the answers. The room changes shape. The walls become slippery. Their limbs feel like rubber.

When did the story become this one? One of them is stabilized, the other bored to death. The common language, verb tenses changing from present to past to future.

What is true?

What is real anymore?

**

In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell talks about extensively about how the nature of human beings resists branding because branding inhibits our ability to “express different selves over time.” When we become brands—or subscribe to the idea that we’re meant to only our authentic, portrayed, online selves at all times—it detracts from our humanity.

We’re meant to listen to each other, contemplate what we’ve heard, ruminate, and occasionally change our minds. We’re meant to apologize when we screw up, not resist the urge to share ourselves because we might be off brand or, worse, because we fear condemnation and cancel culture.

But here we are. And here I am, grappling with the multiplicity of myself and trying to untangle what I thought was my most authentic self.

(Does that put a finger on it?)

**

Every moment is authentic. It is whatever it is, and as long as we’re being ourselves, we’re being authentic. But it shifts. Authenticity isn’t a box in which we sit. It, too, resists definition because it’s a condition of the heart.

Odell says retreat is impossible. We have to figure out how to show up to this system that keeps trying to button us up and pin us down.

Besides, “You do not have to be good,” writes Mary Oliver. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”

**

I am a woman who, as Whitman said, contains multitudes.

Multitudes.

Multiplicity.

Within you. Within me.

One self that contains a thousand selves. A bright light shining through a prism, refracted into every color.

This is the human condition. Mine and yours.

Our capacity for meaningful action. Our exposure to meaningful risk.

The hundreds of thousands of questions we ask again and again.

**

What is hope? What is this story about?

Jenny Odell: “The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being.”

Mary Oliver: “Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”

A woman sits on a porch alone, eyes blinking, her own heart in her hands, a container for the world. A man, her husband, walks in and hands her a drink. She places her heart back in her chest where it belongs. He needs her love; so do the kids.

Tell me something true, she says, the dappled sunlight on his face.

Ask me again.

Ask me and don’t let go.

**

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series “True”.