We are about to embark upon a multi-essay arc.  This arc will explore some areas of personal growth that I’ve wanted to plumb for quite a while.  And like all good multi-essay arcs, this one begins with chopping carrots.  I went to the grocery store early this morning, as has become my custom on a Friday.  Not too many folk are there before 8 am and stocking is usually good.  I got home, put the groceries away and decided to go ahead and cut up the carrots and celery.  I am, afterall, a Morning Person.  (This does not mean that I am necessarily pleasant to be around in the morning, as my college friends will emphatically tell you.  Just that I get more things done in the morning than in the afternoon or evening.)

As I chopped the carrots and celery, I was thinking about Things.  The thing most on my mind this morning was a major achievement from yesterday:  I weighed in at Weight Watchers at over 30 pounds total weight loss and reached my goal weight.  This is a Big F-ing Deal, folks!  For my entire adult life, my weight has been steadily moving in one direction.  I knew what I needed to do.  Losing weight isn’t rocket science.  It is a matter of commitment.  Not willpower; commitment.  Willpower is following a bizarre restriction diet for a period of time until you lose a pre-determined amount of weight.  Once the goal is reached, you relax said WillPower and the weight comes back on.  No, true sustainable weight loss requires commitment to a permanent change.  And commitment requires making a choice around priorities.  Making a change in your priorities requires first an understanding of what your current priorities truly are, which requires some honest introspection.  And honest introspection requires you to be authentic, first with yourself and then with others.  And so we begin.

Authenticity is not an easy thing.  Being truly authentic requires seeing yourself as you are, warts and all, and embracing what you see.  Not pretending faults aren’t there.  Not hoping some less than desirable traits will just change.  Not seeing yourself as you want to be but as you are.  Only then can you change what you want to change.  I have one of those snapshot memories with a co-worker from my Air Products days.  I was in a management role by this time and navigating through my naiveté about how The System worked vs. how I thought it worked or how I thought it should work.  It was exhausting.  This coworker was also a relatively new senior manager and put forth an image of steady perfection:  never a hair out of place; dressed to the 9’s; ramrod straight posture.  I made some comment about some common failing, like having days when you just didn’t feel like coming in and dealing with the day’s bullshit or something like that.  I laughed.  She looked me right in the eye and said, “I’ve never felt that way.”  I tilted my head sideways and looked again.  This time I saw the fear in her eyes—the kind of fear that most of us had every day that showing the littlest chink in your armor would cause the lions to pounce.  I don’t think she saw that in herself, though.  It was scary to admit that vulnerability to yourself, much less others.  But without embracing it and realizing that almost everyone else carried that fear somewhere, it would eat you up.  Remember that Mandela quote, “Courage is not the lack a fear; it’s rising above it.”

Several years ago I read the autobiography of Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court Justice.  It had a huge impact on me. Not just because she overcame a very difficult childhood and young adulthood—so many accomplished people have had to overcome so much.  In fact, that is often what pushes them to such high achievement.  No, what struck me about the book was how she did not shy away from discussing all the ways she screwed up along her journey.  She made some serious mistakes along the way and STILL became incredibly accomplished!  What a revelation!  You don’t have to be perfect.  You just have to keep trying to get better.  One of Brene Brown’s favorite lines (yes, Brene AGAIN) is “I’m not here to BE right, I’m here to GET IT right.”  Sotomayor’s book spoke with an authentic voice I had never heard before and it inspired me.  When I am self-deprecating in my writing, it’s not really about injecting humor and certainly not about patting myself on the back for overcoming something difficult.  It’s about authenticity.  And hopefully encouraging others to not be afraid of finding their own true voice and embracing their whole selves—stupid mistakes, annoying traits, trials, all of it.

So, what is the journey to authenticity like and how do you get on it?  Well, I can only share my own journey.  And it is a long and painful one.  Mine required several rounds of therapy over the years made more difficult by first having to accept and embrace myself as a gay woman.  I also had to learn to accept parts of me that, while having improved over the years, are probably never going to go away.  One is a fear of being blindsided and the related paranoia that I’m doing something or not doing something or not seeing something that is going to result in my being shunned.  This came out of one of those traumatic grade school experiences that rocked me to my core.  I know that fear is still there.  But you know what else is there?  A profoundly developed sense of empathy that has served me very well, if irregularly, over the years.  See, that’s the key to authenticity.  When you embrace your whole true self, when you accept those things about you that probably won’t totally change, then you can find ways to compensate for those traits.  You can find ways to turn them into strengths; you can surround yourself in the workplace and in all aspects of life with people who have strengths that you lack; you can put voice to those traits with others AND constantly work to improve (remember: explanation is not excuse).

Back to my weight loss journey.  It’s now a week later and I’ve maintained for the first week.  Good start!  The journey began not with me listing what I had to do differently but with understanding what was keeping me from doing those things differently.  And THAT begin with authenticity—seeing myself as I am.  The next step:  identifying what my priorities truly are and what I then want them to be.  We’ll pick that up next time.