There is something strangely exhausting about being one’s true and authentic self. We’re told it should be easy, you know, “just be yourself, trust yourself, know yourself, find yourself, live authentically, blah blah blah.” What some horseshit. The advice really sounds liberating, but what happens when you don’t know who the fuck you are? When trauma and survival or privilege has blurred the lines. Modern life has turned authenticity into an obligation.
We are expected to know our passions, values, boundaries, personality, purpose, ideal career, ideal relationship, and even our aesthetic. Christ on a cracker, it’s exasperating! We can’t simply just live anymore! We have to understand, explain, and curate the person who is doing the living. The self has become a school project, and there is always another layer to uncover, another flaw to fix, another version of ourselves waiting on the other side of all this grueling self-improvement. What was supposed to be freedom quickly begins to feel like homework. And not the kind of homework you can do in a day - the kind of homework that requires steps and observations and processing time… days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months, eventually turning into years, kind of homework.
There was a time when identity was largely something handed to you. I experienced this first hand growing up in the 80’s and 90’s. My generation was handed a blueprint. Most of us were born into a family, a religion, a community, a social class, and often a profession, and our lives came with a detailed script. This is who your friends are, this is your god, this is the school you go to, this is the career field you work in, this is how much money you need to survive, for a house, for a family of your own, etc, etc. There was plenty of cruelty in that arrangement, but there was also relief. You didn’t have to constantly wonder whether you were doing life correctly. You were just following the plan as designed.
However, modern freedom tore that shit up. Freedom has a strange habit of becoming its own burden. When nobody tells you who you are supposed to be, you become responsible for deciding. Then you become responsible for deciding whether you decided correctly. We’ve moved from the tyranny of being told who we must become to the subtler tyranny of believing we must discover who we already are. It’s a mouthful I know. But, stay with me. The question “Who am I?” has become less a philosophical inquiry and more a demand for an answer.
Perhaps this is why the modern obsession with authenticity can feel so strangely oppressive. We interpret nearly every choice as evidence of identity. If we hate our job, we’re told we’re being inauthentic. If we stay, we then feel we’re betraying ourselves. If we leave, then it feels like we’re finally choosing ourselves. But what if sometimes a job is simply just a job? What if we stay because we need the money, leave because we are bored, fall in love with the wrong person, change our minds, or want a life that no longer resembles the one we once imagined? We’ve developed a faith in the idea that every decision must express some deeper, complicated, authentic self. Yet human beings are so much messier than that. We contradict ourselves constantly. We change like the wind. We want incompatible things. We act from fear, courage, habit, love, exhaustion, ambition, and sometimes for reasons we don’t even fully understand at all.
Not every choice needs to be a fucking declaration of identity, you know?
The internet has made this even more difficult because we don’t simply have identities anymore. We have curated audiences for them. We begin to experience ourselves from the outside. As a neurodivergent woman, this is a distinct brand of fresh hell for me, because for the longest time, I revolted at being perceived by the outside world. Loathed it. I hated having to answer questions like, how does this look? Is this who I am? Does this fit the person I want to become? What will they think? I wasn’t just living an experience, I was interpreting myself having it. It was soul-sucking.
A person eating dinner is accompanied by another person watching, judging, and asking what the dinner says about them. A person falling in love wonders what the relationship says about their identity. A person taking a job wonders whether it aligns with their values. Eventually, even ordinary life can become a performance review. And maybe this explains why we are so goddamn tired. Because I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted all the time these days. We’re not only living our lives, we’re constantly monitoring ourselves as we live them.
Maybe the answer is not to find ourselves, but to stop expecting that there is a final self waiting to be found. Nietzsche urged us toward becoming, rather than simply discovering. To discover yourself suggests that your true identity already exists somewhere inside of you, complete and waiting. To become yourself means accepting that you are unfinished. You are shaped by what you choose, what you love, what you endure, and what you learn. You’re allowed to outgrow the person you once announced yourself to be. I’ve done it dozens of times in my forty-four years. Unapologetically forever evolving.
You’re allowed to change your mind, become ordinary, want something different, say no and disappoint your former self. Authenticity, perchance, isn’t faithfully expressing some hidden, permanent essence. Maybe it’s simply refusing to lie about the fact that we are always changing. We don’t need the freedom to finally be ourselves.
We need the freedom to become someone new.
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