Authenticity Isn't a Communication Challenge

Being yourself is lonely.

It's commonplace that people should “be authentic," the result of the aughts being something like the "Decade of Authenticity." (A brief history of the topic could begin and end with Brené Brown. In 2010, unknown professor of social work; 2012, TED speaker; half-dozen bestselling books; 2019, Netflix special, all on the strength of her research into vulnerability and shame.)

Authenticity’s attractiveness, its interior justification, is that healthy relationships require trust and connection, and it’s hard for that to happen unless you present yourself in a way that’s consistent, honest, and stable. 

People want to know what you're about, basically, as well they should.

The challenge with authenticity is vulnerability. The fear of being yourself is that no one will like what they see. Authenticity risks personal rejection and courts shame. What’s attractive about authenticity is the courage required to take those risks, and the payoff is finding a community of people who recognize and celebrate “You." 

For most people, then, the “finding yourself” journey is profoundly lonely. People who are truly authentic tend to be people whom we might also call iconoclasts. People who live outside the mainstream, who are “ahead of their time." There are many examples, but for now just imagine anyone you think is famous for their ideas before they got famous. One reason we lionize people who have spent time as “misunderstood geniuses” is to compensate them for their loneliness, to reward them for the courage to be lonely. Believing strongly in something that no one else understands is like having a parent who doesn’t remember your name.  

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a long-deceased judge of the US Supreme Court and one of my personal heroes, once described the work of a lawyer as a species of iconoclasm. Note how bleak the picture:

For I say to you in all sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone—when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying [person], and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will—then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after [they] are dead and forgotten, [people] who never heard of [them] will be moving to the measure of [their] thought. 

Unless you're very lucky to have an authentic voice that resonates widely and immediately (to be quintessentially of your time), it'll take a while for your voice to resonate. That time will be lonely. And when your voice does resonate within a community, the world’s tendency towards change and evolution means that your authentic voice will fall in and out of favour—much like how O.H.W.’s antique prose requires progressive elisions.

Authenticity becomes a communication challenge only when you try to translate your voice into something that resonates with other people. (When you get tired of being a “misunderstood genius” and settle for being merely a “genius.") This work is challenging, but nowhere near as demanding—emotionally demanding—as standing by yourself, shouting into the wind. A truly authentic voice lives in a vacuum, which is to say, is no kind of voice at all. 

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Making the Ordinary Strange is a series of articles about communication and how to do it better. Since most people already know how to communicate, the way to get better is to just do more of what you already know works well. The challenge isn’t learning but noticing, paying attention to how you communicate with other people, which is tricky, because communication happens all the time, like breathing, and how often do you think about breathing? Communication is ordinary, and the ordinary is invisible—until someone makes it strange. (www.TellPeople.ca.)