Authenticity? I'm over it

Why I'm disowning my once beloved value

Like many other soul searching individuals, I’ve taken a number of values assessments, and authenticity has consistently ranked among my top personal values. But over the course of my last semester in college, encouraged by an extremely engaging professor, I’ve decided to disown authenticity.

But, Andie! Are you saving you’re advocating for fakeness? Are you, gasp, rejecting the Just Be Yourself Club?

Not exactly, but I do want to question what it even means to “be yourself.” These two irritating words are supposed to be the magic salve—slathered on by well meaning mentors—for your internal bleeding conflict and confusion. Just be yourself! Oh, okay, now I know exactly how to live my life, thanks so much!

To be authentic means to be genuine, to be real. But who decides if something is real? A prerequisite for the very idea of authenticity is the observer. The judger. Someone who decides if what you’ve just done or who you demonstrate to be is authentic or not.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said that her college professor told her that her novel wasn’t “authentically African” because her characters were too much like him. Because her Nigerian characters drove cars and weren’t starving. Here, the arbiter of authenticity is the person in power who controls the narrative about the world. If your story doesn’t align with his stereotype of you, you’re deemed inauthentic.

Okay, so authenticity has problematic ties to stereotypes and power. But what about my urgent, colossal problems about finding myself, you ask? Isn’t the arbiter of my own authenticity myself? I invite you to question the model against which you measure authenticity. Maybe you’ll realize that, in thinking you’re not a math person, you’ve never considered majoring in the sciences. Maybe you’ll see that, because of your narrative of being an emotional person, you decide that your partner’s rational intellectualization of your feelings must be right. I argue that you’ve internalized the external judger of authenticity, and now, for no good reason, you’ve limited yourself to the static narrative of who you think you are. Which, by the way, is already outdated at this point.

French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, which popularized the essay genre, was published in three editions. In each, he edited the previous version, deleting paragraphs, adding sections, even completely refuting his previous self. He wasn’t being inauthentic writing the third edition by not staying true to his previous opinions, nor was he being inauthentic in the first edition by not saying what he really thought. He just changed his mind.

In a world where everything must be plotted out on a rising linear trajectory, changing your mind seems like wasting your time, racking up regrets and crises. But it’s just living, thinking, and reflecting—learning from your experiences in the world.

There exist many competing interests in the world and in ourselves. German social theorist Max Weber described society as a bunch of value spheres governed by their own principles (science governed by rationale, religion by faith, arts by beauty, law by justice, economy by profit, and politics by power). They’re often in direct conflict or overlap, but as individuals we’re forced to exist at the threshold of these spheres and to navigate their complexity. Is it inauthentic to crave peace of mind from a stable job and yearn to wander the world or do creative work? No, it’s interesting. You’re not a one-dimensional character with a shtick. How would anyone stay constant in a turbulent world?

“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.” -Virginia Woolf

Multiplicity is everywhere in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Light shines on dinner parties, an in-progress painting, and even a kitchen table, from all sorts of angles. The light that reflects each character’s perspective bleeds together. It’s through peeking into all of their consciousnesses that we get a comprehensive understanding of who each of them seem to be.

So maybe my aversion to authenticity is also this—an aversion to having a narrative. Why constantly ask yourself, “Who am I?” when you could just go do a bunch of things you find interesting and have them all coagulate into a person? But then again, maybe I’ll completely disagree with this post next year.