The Light Beneath the Door: Our Longing for Authenticity

In the coming down from my last essay: Performing for an Audience That Isn’t There, I have been wandering the hallways of self-exploration, wanting to understand the why-because of how social media crept in so deeply in the first place. And I have found some answers. In a word: Art.

Art in all of its facets and variations from musicality, paintings and sculpture, literature, aesthetics, fragrance, and visual presence.

Ultimately what I have struggled with as a writer and as a content creator is where to draw the line of my authentic self and performed self. I am a writer of scenes and of sensation; the question of where authenticity stops and performance begins has been approached as if there were a line to be found. For myself I have come to understand that there isn’t one. Not a clean one, anyway; if there is a light under the doorway in my subconscious, I wish to make you see it…and to wrestle with its meaning.

My identity is far less isolated and original than I have imagined. I was not created in a vacuum: I am an assembly of experiences that have placed me both in the room and outside of it…on either side of the door, questioning the spark of illumination. And I am consistently drawn to art that communicates and reflects that back to me.

This isn’t to say that I am unoriginal; but I am both mirror and clay, reflecting the experiences that have shaped me. It only makes sense that I, a person who so deeply resonates with internal experiences, would seek them out externally: through music, and art gallery visits, in the books I read. It is a startling thing to discover that my unforged path has already been paved by artists before me.

In my truest form, I pursue ways to negotiate vulnerability vs performance - to articulate my emotional architecture and scaffold my life as art - and to organize my psyche. Symbolically.

The part of me that was seeking an outlet on short-form social media, where the weight of self expression, identity, and all the contradictions that come with it, was attempting to be seen. Of course a burn out was on the horizon. To be confined to performance without vulnerability, or adornment without truth, left me with a beautiful cover of a book no one wanted to read, and one that I wasn’t entirely sure how to write.

I question all of my past social media presence: was it all performance for performance sake, and if it was, was that bad? Did it make it less meaningful, or real? And perhaps more importantly, was it deceptive? Or was it an attempt to realize meaning-making?

This self - all of this that makes me myself needs an outlet. Not particularly for the consumption of algorithms, but for the same reason others have books or music or a painting inside of them that must get out - it is the psyche recognizing itself in symbolic form. It’s acknowledging that certain imagery: a woman standing barefoot on a tile floor in her nightgown, a man seated in his doorway lighting a cigar…the sounds of violin wafting through the hot evening air - these all exist in their realist form without performance, and still speak symbolically in a way that will light the match of creation.

I had thought that the goal was to strip myself into some pure essence untouched by influence or adaptation. But…how does one sever oneself from experience? I now know that is as impossible as asking a wave to remain on the shore. No natural being can exist in such a form.

The goal is to gather parts of me, piece by piece - like pink pebbles in the sand, and to bring them home and tell each story of their discovery. To speak of the waves that made their rough edges smooth, how still, I cut my fingers on a jagged edge, and was still able to make meaning and beauty with every find.

Further reading:

Performing for an Audience That Isn’t There

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Mar 22

Seeing a series of dotted lines at the top of my Instagram Stories used to mean that I was on vacation, or fulfilling the duties of a Brand Trip. What my audiences didn’t see were the several hours that were spent in preparation for the “real time” Stories: the outfits, the font and color scheme planning, the various apps researched for specialty layout…

Patience and Self-betrayal

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Jan 8

I have conversations with myself; and sometimes I even have them out loud, whilst walking or hiking. It helps to clear my mind, organize my thoughts, and settle the constant jitteriness that seems to have taken hold over me these past few weeks.