"Finding your authentic self" is nonsense
- HeardinLondon
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 185
I see loads of talk online about people being their authentic self- ... and how you can make all of these moves to try and find , your authentic self. And I don't think that that's language that most of us use in our everyday lives. I don't know that it's that useful, and actually, I think the whole premise of finding your "authentic self" denies a whole load of systemic problems that mean that it's not actually safe for some people to be their authentic self.
Where if being your authentic self is to be trans in Kansas right now, and you wanna go and get in a car to the supermarket? Maybe that's not safe for you to do. This idea that there is some moral hierarchy about people who can be their true authentic vision of themselves actually doesn't acknowledge the fact that some people have very different realities of what safety means in this current moment in history.
And actually, saying that there is an authentic self to discover kind of denies that there is a whole load of complexities and different versions of you that need to turn up to different situations and be different versions of yourself in different scenarios. And that there's one just fixed static version and that that has some greater value than whatever you're putting out there now, and frankly, I call bullshit on that.
I believe that the way that we show up in any situation could probably do with a lot less criticism than we give ourselves. You know quite often how to turn up in different situations, whether it's a work relationship, a friend relationship, in your family dynamics. There may be some relationships that you actually wanna do some work on, and you might want to improve some of the interactions and the old habits that are coming up for you. But selling yourself out there as some static being for which you need to work hard and chisel away to try and show this genuine version of yourself that you've been hiding, I just don't think that that idea serves us at all.
I think that probably most of us could do with looking at the situations that we're in, in any capacity in our lives, and giving ourselves a little bit less of a hard time for it.
So maybe there's a work scenario and you think that you probably could have handled it better, or maybe there is some friction in your social circle, and there's someone who's causing you a bit of trickiness, and you would like to find a better way to respond to the way they interact on WhatsApp group chats. Or maybe it's the way that you talk to yourself when you're on social media, and you can see a whole load of other people putting their very curated lives out there, and you find yourself comparing yourself to other people even though that's not what you really want to do ethically...
all of these little moments can serve as just reminders for us to go, "Okay, here's what's gone on. Here's where I would like to be. How can I treat myself with kindness in this moment rather than criticism? Is there any way that I can move more towards the person that I want to be in this scenario without making the decisions that I've made so far wrong? Without telling myself that I should've done things differently or that I wasn't good enough, I didn't say the right thing, I wasn't the best version of myself?" How can you move more towards the kind of person that you want to be without making the, version of you that is now your enemy?
Choosing your identity is a practice. It's not a destination. It's something that hopefully there's gonna be 1,000 different versions of you before you die. I'm sure that the version of you who's listening to this is very different to the version of you who was 31 or 17 or seven,... and it's gonna be very different to the version of th- you that's gonna be 87, and everything in between. It's gonna be different from the version of you that's this afternoon.
There is no one true self that you're trying to get towards, but there is one truth to all of it, and that is that we're gonna get more towards more versions of ourselves that are more in alignment with who we want to be if we're not bullying ourselves on the way there.
So what are the spaces where you can bring more kindness into your days? Into the way that you speak to yourselves, yourself? Especially when things are not quite going the way that you thought that they should have done?
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I think there is a huge value in choosing who you want to be and how you want to respond to things rather than this endless search for who you are. I think a lot of us feel like there is an idea as to who we should be, and maybe we're there, maybe we don't feel like we quite hit the nail on the head.
We're constantly searching for this idea of how to adult right, how to live a life that shows that we have all of the markers of what adulthood should look like, and to live a good life, and to show that we're doing things okay.
And maybe we're just making it all up. Maybe we're just muddling along and doing the best that we can. And in that vein, if there is a way that you can look at your days, your interactions, your relationships, and speak to yourself with more kindness, you're definitely gonna have a more enjoyable ride.
I hope that this is a useful concept for you to bring home next time something feels like it's a little bit tricky or perhaps you didn't act in a way that you think is most admirable.
There are loads of links and resources in the show notes, and I will speak to you next week
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