The True, Authentic Nature of a Human Being
How to explain who and what we are—without the labels?
What’s your Enneagram number? Your sun sign? Moon sign?
How about your Myers’-Briggs? Your StrengthsFinder results? Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
I love taking these personality tests as much as anyone. They have guided me into a better understanding of myself and how I both perceive and am perceived by the world. Tools like these have freed me to more fully be who I am—A Gemini, an introvert, an INFJ with entrepreneurial tendencies—and not try to change into someone or something else.
But at some point, any tool which initially frees us can also trap us. Because these tools and tests are about labeling ourselves and each other—we can get stuck believing we’re always supposed to behave in accordance with our test results.
Think of how we wear name tags at events and they “stick” to us. And then, how often we go about the rest of our day, still wearing this label but completely unaware of it.
This is the problem with labels–they “stick” to us, and we forget to take them off once and a while to explore our greater wholeness.
And if you’ve read any of my work so far, you’ll know that I am not an advocate for labels.
Labels become shortcuts that we use to understand each other’s general characteristics without really taking the time to understand each other.
In fact, any noun is only a shortcut, a bypass, to knowing something in its wholeness. Think how quickly we walk by a tree and think, “oak tree” and don’t spend any more time exploring the mystery of this individual creation. We think we know the tree, because we’ve labeled the tree. And it’s the same with human beings.
We label things, of course, to make our own lives easier. To understand the person in front of us (or in the mirror), we take shortcuts and look for clues — titles, bumper stickers, test results, wedding rings, or family photos.
In theory, maybe, we say we want others to show up as their authentic selves. But in practice, we’d rather interact with a facade — a mere mirage of a person — over the whole, complicated, changeable person. We’ll take a “Steady Eddie” over a “Moody Molly.”
A business partner once said to me, exasperated, “Keri, I never know what to expect with you. Some days you’re easy-going and chatty, other days you’re closed-off and touchy.” At the time, I felt bad—I thought that I should be more consistent in my personality. But now, I wish I could go back to that time and say, “Well of course this is true. I change. I’m a human being, not a computer program.”
Here are a few ways we could start understanding the true nature of human beings—descriptions that might give us all a little more freedom from the labels. Try using these the next time someone asks you what your sun sign is!
The true, authentic nature of a human being is slippery and mysterious, like time.
I remember as a kid, before digital clocks, the smooth movement of a clock hand hypnotizing me as it traveled around the face. There was a liquidness to time, a slipperiness to it. I couldn’t pin it down, but I could feel the changes. Sometimes, time moved fast. Other times, painfully slow. I was always trying to catch it, or make it catch up to me. We all have experienced this “time travel.” There is an aura of infinite possibility that exists around time. We can slice and dice time all we want, but it remains ultimately un-pinnable.
The true, authentic nature of a human being is ungraspable, like a sunset.
Any time I try to capture the exact moment of a day’s last ray of sunlight, I stand there saying, “Now…no…now…wait, now for sure,” but I’m still not sure. I can’t quite grasp it. I don’t think we are meant to grasp it.
The true, authentic nature of a human being is multi-skinned, like a snake.
Each skin carries us into a new stage of life offering a deepened maturity, a wizened perspective, an altered viewpoint. Each skin is a role or title we play for a while until it gets too tight. Sometimes, like a snake, we become irritable at the end of a lifecycle. We withdraw from the world, threatening to bite anyone who comes close to us. We need this retreat from the world to slip out of our skin, and reemerge, reborn.
The true, authentic nature of a human being is constantly in flux, like nature herself.
In fact, we are made from the same ingredients as nature — earth, water, fire, air, and ether. I’ve never seen a fire, or the ocean, or even the sand beneath my feet act the same way two days in a row. Why should we be any different?
The true, authentic nature of a human being is multi-dimensional and limitless, like the soul itself.
And as human beings entrusted with our traveling souls, we have every right, in fact we have every obligation, to let the light shine on the multiplicity of our nature. To be messy on Monday and beautiful on Tuesday and fuck-it-all on Friday. As souls embodied on this earth, we could even say it is our duty and our right never to be limited or defined by the stuff of this earth.
Especially the world’s countless, sticky labels.
I choose to remain a puzzle, an enigma, even if it sends people away scratching their heads.
I relish in the joy of shapeshifting—vanishing and reappearing at will, closed-off and touchy some days, chatty and easygoing other days.
I want to be someone who slips her skin before anyone can stick a label on me, including myself.
I want to be like time, like a sunset, like nature — a mysterious, slippery, spacious, limitless possibility.
Thanks for reading! Here are a few other pieces you might like to explore:
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