The Anguish of Authenticity
Years ago I decided to become more myself, to hide out less in my mind in the presence of my fellow humans.
I started noticing I occasionally woke up in the middle of the night ruminating angrily about a conversation I’d had that day. Someone had said something to me, I was annoyed, and I couldn’t shake it. I replayed it over and over — what so-and-so had said to me, what I wished I’d said back, what I would have said if I’d just summoned up the nerve.
Then I noticed this: Whenever I did respond, even if it was just one word — “no,” for example — I didn’t wake up at 3am incarnated as a hamster on a spinning wheel, didn’t stay angry, didn’t have to watch the scene on repeat in the home theater of my brain. I just moved on. Even if what the person had said to me was awful, I was fine. It was simply over. I had insisted on my own existence, and that was what mattered.
This insight has stayed with me: When I negotiate human moments honestly and assertively instead of hiding out in my practiced inwardness and invisibility, not only do I feel better, I sleep better. And since nothing is more foundational to health than sleep, it seems authenticity isn’t optional. It’s not just a matter of style, it’s a survival skill.
For some people, all of this is only natural. God bless them. I love hanging out with unmuzzled souls to whom it has never even occurred to spare the rest of us by muting themselves. They’re breathtaking.
My fiancé’s ten-year-old daughter Mavis, with whom I’ve grown closer and closer over the past few years, is one of those. She says whatever’s on her mind immediately and with zero worry about whether it will make someone like her less. “You’re bothering me,” she’ll blurt out without warning, or, “I love you, Bear” (she calls me Bear).
It’s astounding. I can only aspire to her abandon, her strength. I bear witness to her antics with a mix of admiration, pride, and ripping sadness. No one has pulverized or erased her. She’s not in hiding.
But for those of us who were educated to bludgeon ourselves into silence so as not to arouse the hostility of the dark carnival into which we were born, nothing could be less intuitive. It’s a big rewiring. It takes awareness and practice. Most of all it takes courage, a terrible courage.
Change comes at a cost. People might leave. Things might change. But one recovers something precious beyond compare: Oneself.
So I pass this scrap of insight along from the rigors of my bumpy journey:
Do Not Falter Long
Do not falter long
along this chasm of mutes.
Give utterance,
unleash it on
the kindling
of the moment.
Do not let your silence
hang too hungry in the air.
Phantoms behind your ribs
will claw words back down
long before they reach your tongue.
Down there, they will congeal into fossils
to become new claws,
new silence.
And unwelcome looms a dread
too ghastly to be fronted,
but you must
speak.
Through hooks and brambles,
speak.
And if ice clutches your throat, speak.
And if the flame in your spine gutters, still speak.
For if you never tell
the story burning in you,
how lonely you will be;
A flower wilting in a sunless tract,
you will grasp at air,
and never know who might have loved
your crazy broken song.