How to Find True Love

Part III: Discovering Your Authenticity

It’s quite often that we hear the phrases ‘be yourself’ ‘be authentic’ ‘be who you really are,’ and all the like. Phrases like these get tossed around so much, regurgitated through people, through the media, through influencers, actors, and music artists, that we actually start to forget their fundamental meaning. The phrases become more of a cliché than something to actually consider.

The thing is, it’s not that easy for people to just abruptly decide to ‘be themselves’ one day. Because most people have no idea who they really are. How can we be authentic, when don’t know what authenticity is? How can we pursue the things we love, when we don’t even know what those things are? Our true identity isn’t that straightforward, it’s not that simple. It’s not just handed to us on a silver platter with a list of ticked boxes of who we are, what we like, and what career we want.

Or – maybe it is. And maybe that’s the problem.

Maybe the reason so many of us are so confused is because we are caught in a blizzard of societal expectations, family obligations, financial constraints, community values, and such. And that blizzard is blinding us from seeing who we really are. From the moment we take our first breaths, before we can even conceive of what identity is, we are told what our identity should be. Our families create stories about the adults we will one day grow into. Our social circles inform us about what is, and isn’t, accepted. Our institutions, our communities, our media sources – every piece of stimuli we are subjected to, subjects us to the role we are meant to play into. And for many of us – it works. We go with the flow, we follow the pack, we opt for the path of least resistance. Because dismal familiarity feels better than uncertainty.