Striving to be authentic

I wanted my friends to think I cared about the environment, so I started becoming more conscious of what I ate and how I disposed of things

I wanted my friends to perceive me as knowledgeable, so I’d memorize important ideas to share with others

I wanted my family to think I cared, so one day I cooked for my grandmother, who I knew would lovingly tell my father.

I wanted the world to think I sacrificed, so I began making appointments and efforts to help others.

I wanted to seem and so I did. In doing I recognized the importance of what I had drawn myself into. In wanting to seem my participation became a hundred times more difficult. My motivation was me and what I what I wanted others to see, but never what I thought I should be.

Those self-driven incentives drove me into a state of hard awareness, as I began to try doing what I was doing, but in a different state of mind.

I started to see that authenticity was more than doing, but being as well. Authenticity could hardly be being without doing either. No it was both, and my life couldn’t be a struggle for authenticity, but for coherence between the things that I thought and consequently, how I chose to act.