The War of Being Yourself: Accessing Authenticity

‘‘That which is to give light must endure burning’’- Viktor Frankl

From dealing with disappointed family members over your poor life choices, to pursuing something that secretly stirs you, but you keep putting it off again and again.

Why?

Because it goes against the very person you’ve been portraying all of these years.

Simply put, being ourselves is a war.

Who Are We Really?

To thine own self be true

- Hamlet, William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’.

The idea of self has echoed millennia from Socrates’ Know thyself’ to modern-day psychotherapists and philosophers.

However, the earliest known sign of authenticity, the realizing of self’s truest form, particularly in Western civilization, arguably starts with Shakespeare, that hidden within each of us is a true self we must aim to actualize in this lifetime, yet so few of us do.

According to The Gospel of Thomas:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

In denying our full expression, are we then, in fact, hurting ourselves, betraying and suppressing who we truly are meant to be?

These days, many of us feel compelled to present a more heightened, superficial portrayal of ourselves to appease the masses.

Whether it’s within our community or on social media, this character armor is a calloused coping mechanism that we lean on to counter any unwarranted feelings of rejection and ridicule from others.

Short term, it may feel like it’s protecting us, but long term, the repercussions can lead to numbing our true self, succumbing to what Kierkegaard calls spiritual sickness.

We need not look further than how we attach our identity to conform with society’s ideals as a perfect example.

Although this path may be more secure, it is also a surefire way of losing oneself within the crowd.

Once one operates within this system, they’re locked in, and therefore cannot change or stray away from the collective in fear of judgment and persecution.

A good indicator of how much the crowd influences our authentic well-being is when our fear of upsetting the masses outweighs our fear of not becoming our true self.

Define ‘Fear’

Fear is the biggest inhibitor to authenticity there is, quashing dreams and ambitions in their wake in order to appease the status quo.

According to author Tim Ferriss’ Ted Talk on Why you should define your fears instead of your goals, the average person deals with 6–10 depressive episodes throughout their lives while those suffering from depression, or disorders such as bipolar, suffer considerably more.

Often in life, fear can swell in our imagination, becoming so unbearably overwhelming that we cannot help but be consumed by it, but it need not be that way, especially if we already know in advance what we’re getting into.

In the Ted Talk, Ferriss introduces an exercise where you list your fears from goals to phobias, arguing that if we can anticipate the obstacles that are sure to arise, then we are more equipped to deal with them.

If we can define the fear, anticipate ways of preventing the reality of that fear from manifesting, and then addressing how to repair the damage of that fear should it transpire, then we are more equipped to confront that fear.

Under Define write down (as specific as possible) all the worst-case scenarios that could happen to you if you were to pursue your goal.

For example:

• Asking someone out on a date- potential embarrassment, being shunned.
• Leaving the job you hate for the job of your dreams- Losing guaranteed financial security, gambling for the future.

Under Prevent write down all the solutions you could have to combat these worst-case scenarios or very least, how could you minimize the impact of the worst-case scenario.

Under Repair, should the worst-case scenario arise, write down what could you do to repair it, or very least get yourself back to the start point, before you pursued the goal.

What’s good about this exercise is that it’ll either confirm your fears to be as bad as you thought or reveal that it was nowhere near as bad as you initially believed.

Forever in the Fight

Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance

-Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Imagine looking in the mirror in 5, 10, 20 years after living the life that went against your very being:

What would that look like? How would you feel? What would you look like?

Now conversely do the same, imagining how strong would you feel if you had put years into a life that was yours. How does that feel?

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

- E.E. Cummings

Sometimes it means fighting the world in order to remain yourself for that day or fighting against the very nature you’ve had a hand in creating, having been a conformed citizen of the world for so long, the world and all of its relenting ways, will not cease in telling us who and what we should be, and that’s why, day after day, through stern resolve we must endure it.

Only then will the war be won.