Always Becoming

Happy faaaaaaace. And twist. Happy faaaaaaace. And twist.

Happy faaaaaaace.

The yel­low, tuft­ed smi­ley face car charm that hangs from my truck’s rear view mir­ror danced along to my music, tak­ing cues from the blasts of air com­ing from the vents.

And every­time it twists, it reveals its hap­py face. Which, in turn, makes me smile.

I reck­on that’s why I bought it.

What mat­ters is whether or not I am liv­ing in a way that feels right to me. Am I liv­ing authentically?

You see — I have been Marie-Kondoing my life late­ly. Getting rid of the things that don’t “spark joy,” and well, bring­ing in things that do.

I had an epiphany the oth­er night look­ing at that sil­ly lit­tle smi­ley face. I was dri­ving home from a trip to Lexington, singing along to John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream.” I could see the beau­ti­ful cres­cent moon as the sun was going down. The cold air from my air con­di­tion­er was a nice relief from the late sum­mer heat, and my cur­rent favorite drink — a zero-sug­ar cher­ry coke — was sit­tin’ pret­ty in my cup holder.

I felt good. No, I felt hap­py. I felt authen­ti­cal­ly me.

It has been a long jour­ney to get to this point.

I think back to all of the clas­sic com­ing of age sto­ries. “The Breakfast Club.” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” “Stand By Me.” “The Perks of Being A Wallflower.” All of the sto­ries I know fea­ture teenagers com­ing into or near­ing adult­hood. And in that process, they learn who they are, who they want to be.

I nev­er got a chance to do that.

I mean, yeah, those sto­ries are an ide­al­ized nar­ra­tive where every­thing hap­pens to fall into place and end hap­pi­ly ever after. Of course, that’s not real life.

But it’s what we were told as teens. Adulthood was sup­posed to be some anti­dote for teenage angst and awk­ward­ness. And we were expect­ed to know what we want­ed to do with our life the sec­ond we moved our tas­sels to the left.

I spent my first years of adult­hood just try­ing to sur­vive. Scraping by on pen­nies to be the first in my fam­i­ly to grad­u­ate from college.

And naive­ly, after uni­ver­si­ty, I thought it would get bet­ter. I thought get­ting my first “big girl” job would be exact­ly what I need­ed to be happy.

But I learned that when you tru­ly love what you do, the heart­break hits hard when the indus­try dis­ap­points you.

And as the years of my ear­ly 20s passed by, life kept enrolling me in new lessons. Between the toll of finan­cial hard­ship, the deaths of loved ones, endur­ing emo­tion­al and domes­tic abuse from a part­ner, an unprece­dent­ed glob­al pan­dem­ic and so much more, I nev­er had the time for my own com­ing of age story.

Though, I did think about those ques­tions over the years — Who am I? Who do I want to be? What do I want to do with my life? And all of those oth­er lofty, exis­ten­tial questions.

But it wasn’t until now, at 25, did I real­ize that none of that actu­al­ly matters.

What mat­ters is whether or not I am liv­ing in a way that feels right to me. Am I liv­ing authentically?

I was lis­ten­ing to a pod­cast — Vox Conversations — while out on a walk the oth­er day. The episode title caught my eye. It was “The quest for authen­tic­i­ty.” And in it, the host, Sean Illing, talked with Skye Cleary, a philoso­pher and author of the book, “How to be Authentic.”

During their con­ver­sa­tion, Cleary talked about how peo­ple mis­use the term, “authen­tic­i­ty.”

Oftentimes, we hear authen­tic­i­ty described as just being your­self. Or you hear peo­ple say they are going to “find them­selves,” as if they could just dive deep into the sea of their inner self, only to return to the sur­face with their “true self” in tow. It almost sounds easy or even tangible.

When real­ly, as Cleary describes, there is no fixed essence or fixed blue­print with­in our­selves that we need to uncov­er. There is no end point. There is no per­fect, final form of our­selves wait­ing to be found.

Instead, authen­tic­i­ty is a process. We are con­tin­u­ous­ly cre­at­ing our­selves, con­stant­ly chang­ing, some­times renew­ing or recon­nect­ing, always becoming.

To me, that’s freeing.

I didn’t need time to fig­ure myself out but rather I should embrace who I am now and accept that who I am or what I want might change.

Another thing that helped me reach this point of authen­tic­i­ty or feel­ing authen­ti­cal­ly me was shed­ding the ideas of how I should be. The ideas that soci­ety had so auda­cious­ly shoved down my throat the minute I came into this world.

From birth, we — women espe­cial­ly — are con­di­tioned to ful­fill cer­tain roles in life. For women, we are sup­posed to be moth­ers, house­wives, to be small and qui­et, to do as we’re told. We’re told what we should want and what we should look like.

Cleary and Illing talked about this on the podcast.

According to Simone de Beauvoir, a French philoso­pher whose phi­los­o­phy is the pri­ma­ry sub­ject of Cleary’s book, to be human is to stretch beyond those roles.

I feel authen­ti­cal­ly me when I wear my glass­es, when I lis­ten to the same song over and over and over until I’m final­ly ready to move to the next song, when I sing about the task I’m doing, when I read a book and can’t put it down, when I make a big pot of soup, when I do a sil­ly lit­tle dance through my kitchen to my liv­ing room…

Cleary goes on to say that to be authen­tic means to hold your­self in ques­tion. Are you just blind­ly plod­ding through life ful­fill­ing these roles OR are you push­ing back? Do you want to push back? Do those roles feel authen­tic to you and what you want?

I knew ear­ly on that I would nev­er be what soci­ety expect­ed of me. I don’t want chil­dren. I don’t want to be a wife. And I am cer­tain­ly not small or quiet.

Some of those parts were eas­i­er for me to accept about myself, but it can still be dif­fi­cult to voice those opin­ions aloud in the com­pa­ny of peo­ple behold­en to society’s long-stand­ing structures.

But I am no longer com­pro­mis­ing myself or let­ting go of the parts of my exis­tence that feel so me.

My per­son­al quest for authen­tic­i­ty and the whole Marie-Kondoing my life actu­al­ly result­ed in some pret­ty big shifts.

Some were exter­nal like quit­ting my job. Others were more inter­nal and incred­i­bly vul­ner­a­ble. Like final­ly stand­ing a lit­tle more firm­ly in my queer identity.

Becoming more me also man­i­fest­ed in small­er ways. These days, I essen­tial­ly live in over­alls because that’s what I feel most me in.

I feel authen­ti­cal­ly me when I wear my glass­es, when I lis­ten to the same song over and over and over until I’m final­ly ready to move to the next song, when I sing about the task I’m doing, when I read a book and can’t put it down, when I make a big pot of soup, when I do a sil­ly lit­tle dance through my kitchen to my liv­ing room…

That night in the truck, all of the parts of my life were in har­mo­ny. According to Beauvoir, hap­pi­ness is a flour­ish­ing that comes from liv­ing in har­mo­ny with the world and is a side effect of being authentic.

I am hap­pi­er these days because I am final­ly able to live life on my own terms. I’m not just sur­viv­ing and I still don’t know who I am or what I want out of life, but I feel like me.

And although hap­pi­ness will ebb and flow through the sea­sons and sec­onds of one’s life as har­mo­ny isn’t ever­p­re­sent, accord­ing to Beauvoir, it’s impor­tant to embrace that ambi­gu­i­ty and tension.

So for now, I’m smil­ing along with that sil­ly lit­tle smi­ley face car charm.

Feeling hap­py, feel­ing like me.

And twist.