The Futile Search for "Authenticity": How the Self is Decided, Not Discovered

I don’t know about you, but for me, the last few months have involved a lot of soul-searching.

I would have said “introspection”, but that word implies that I’ve actually been studying my inner self. I certainly thought I was, but now I’m not so sure. “Soul-searching” feels more accurate, not in the sense that I was searching within my soul, but that I was searching for my soul.

Over the last few months, I have been thinking about authenticity, what it means, what it looks like to live authentically. I have wondered about my truth, tried to figure out my deepest core needs, desperate to know for sure because there are real and monumental changes afoot that depend on these answers, this knowledge.

My contemplations have brought me to the groundbreaking conclusion (/s) that there’s no way of knowing, in any objective way, what my “truth” is or what “living authentically” looks like for me. Our true, authentic selves are not discovered, they are decided*—hopefully by us. What I mean by “decided” here is the moments when we have realizations about ourselves and commit to them. The realization—about a hobby, a career, a partner, a habit, a preference—is nothing until we choose to incorporate it into our self-perception, which in turn informs our presentation to the world.

Rather than find this liberating, at the moment, I’m just exhausted by it. If so many of us experience decision fatigue from trying to pick a TV show to watch, how much worse is that fatigue when it comes to deciding who we are in the world? If we don’t discover ourselves, and instead decide what our selves are, but we are constantly beset by outside opinions of and demands upon those selves—how are we ever supposed to know our true selves? Is there even such a thing as a true human self that can be understood in isolation, even from our own minds?

And, in yet more exhaustion, in my experience, others expect decisions to be justified, particularly when those decisions beget changes. But what if the justification is simply, “I want to experience this”? “I want to expand my palette of self, and this metaphorical color attracts me, and I want to see what it looks like on me”? Our society is not built for exploration for its own sake, certainly not of our selves. Individuality, eccentricity, is a privilege afforded only to a few, and it has its own archetype.

Let’s think of this a little differently. I’ve sought treatment for various things by answering a hundred versions of the question, “Are the symptoms disruptive to your life?” I always thought it made sense to ask that question, but lately I’ve realized that it’s a surprisingly deep and difficult one, at least if you look past the capitalist surface level that most providers are really asking about (i.e., is this making you a less productive worker?). Maybe I just take it too seriously; but in order to answer the question, it seems like you need to know your truth, your deepest authentic life—otherwise how are you supposed to recognize that, for example, the depression symptoms are “disruptive” and not just how your life is supposed to be?

It’s also a risk-averse question. It’s, “Are you struggling enough to make change worth it, or are you fine to keep plodding along as you’ve been going?” Not, “What possibilities for happiness are created by the changes you’re contemplating?” It is a question that focuses on fear and unhappiness. How bad is it, really? Is it bad enough, or could it be worse? What is enough? What is worse?

We decide who we are by experiencing, and by taking what feels right to us and building it into ourselves. Which is why the risk-aversion of “are the symptoms disruptive?” is entirely counter-productive to the self-knowledge it is demanding. There is no way to know what feels right to you without trying. How do we know if the symptoms are disruptive when we’ve been living with them for so long? How do we know if we like this hobby unless we try it? How do we know if our life can withstand a change unless we change it?

Our selves are fundamentally dynamic because we are alive; the only way to know ourselves is simply to live.

So—where shall I leave you, in this philosophical newsletter entry? Be prudent, but not fearful, and encourage curiosity and exploration whenever and wherever possible—including in your own heart.

-Neil

*Obviously there are some things that we do not get to decide, because our society has created systems of such powerful inertia that individuals are forced to be subject to their taxonomies. Imagine how much harder self-determination is in those conditions.

The Myth of Inner Strength: In Praise of External Validation

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Time flies when big things are happening!

Since signing with my agent in May, I’ve been hard at work on expanding the THEN COME KISS ME pitch package to include more art, more script, and more details as we prepare to send it out to editors and publishers in the hopes of getting a contract. I expected this work to take me ages, and it certainly hasn’t been fast, but I have definitely been surprised at how quickly I’ve been able to move through these things—my confidence and competence have reached a wonderfully steady place, and it feels really good.

But that isn’t the only work I’ve been doing since my last newsletter. I also finished the final round of edits on I Will Go to the Bank by the Wood, which is soon to make its first ventures into the world looking for blurbs, those praising quotes from other authors and established figures on the cover of books. I’ve also done some freelance writing for a mobile dating game, and been hired as a coach for PlayWrite, a nonprofit here in Portland that mentors youth at the edge through intensive playwriting workshops.

Oh, and we bought a house. So you might say I’ve been busy!

In previous years, I’ve been quick to be burnt out by this level of activity. I spent a lot of time ruminating over the reasons, zeroing in on defects in my mind, my process, trying to find any and every thing that could be optimized to make me and my work perfect. I don’t need to tell you that this was a fruitless endeavor.

What’s been unusual about the amount and level of the work I’ve been doing since about October 2020 is its duration. The boom has yet to bust, and since summer is always my most energetic period, it doesn’t show any signs of stopping. And I don’t feel like I’m strapped to the front of a roller coaster. I feel amazing. I have never felt so good about what I’m doing, not since I was a baby writer finishing my first manuscript with absolutely no idea what publishing was like.

While I am older and more experienced than I’ve ever been, I think the primary difference is not about me being “truer to myself” or having “found my inner resilience.” I think the biggest factor here is the major increase in external validation I’ve received in regard to my work.

I sold a book to a local publisher and a great friend whose opinion I’ve highly valued. I’ve had a consistent and dedicated writing group, meeting bi-weekly or more for two years. I began working with a painting tutor who praises my skill, eye, and imagination as much as she offers suggestions and advice. I finally signed with an agent who believes not just in my writing and illustration abilities but also in my potential for a literary career. Of course I have always had support from my friends and family, but the last two years, and the last year especially, have provided me with validation and support from experts in my fields of creative pursuit, which hits a bit differently.

It is important to have a degree of faith in oneself—without it, it’s hard to get started at all. But I think it’s absolutely crucial for creatives to understand that this external validation is also vital to many of us. It’s important to remember not only as one is getting started, but also as one becomes established and respected. It is not weakness to acknowledge that we need to be validated by people who intimately understand the nature of the work we are putting in. Creative labor is skilled labor, and professional appreciation matters.

As I put it to the program director of PlayWrite during my interview: as I enjoy my newfound stability, I’ve found my desires shifting. I’m focused less (only slightly) on my own ambitions and achievements, and more on turning around and doing what I can to pass on what I’ve learned, to help those who are coming up behind me. I know how much this support has meant to me. If I can offer anything like the professional praise I’ve received to someone else who needs it, I’ll count myself lucky.

The Year of Competence

Resolution posts, amiright?

One of my favorite YouTubers is CGP Grey, and his most recent video is on resolutions, why they always fail, and how to do it better.

Grey proposes using broad, directional themes to guide behavior change, rather than setting a fixed-time + fixed-scope goal (i.e. lose 10 pounds in a year). Themes allow for unpredictability, for recalibration, and for small gestures as well as grand ones.

I’m into it. So I’ve decided 2020 will be my Year of Competence.

What do I mean by that? It doesn’t sound very glamorous. But it’s what I need this year.

This year, I will believe in the skills I already have. I will believe people when they admire those skills. I will remember that having a skill is not the same as executing the skill and that some days, execution will be easier than others, but the days that it’s hard do not mean I have lost the skill, or that I never had it. I will remember that skills must be practiced.

This year I will learn new skills. I will build on the skills I have, I will try new things, I will push myself one foothold higher on the rock wall and hang there until I’m sure I won’t fall; and then I will do it again.

This year, I will remember that skill is not everything. That beauty doesn’t have to be perfect. That something can be called “beautiful” by different people for different reasons, and that even if I see something that falls below my expectations, I can try to see it through someone else’s eyes.

This year I will remember that my art is storytelling and I am very good at it, even if I’m currently better at painting with words than paint.

This year I will believe in my competence, increase my competence, and assert my competence.

Happy 2020.

Occam's Razor and the Invisible Trans Person

I invite you to consider the following quote: 

“He had planned, indeed, to cut off his genitals altogether, but that desire was prompted solely by his effeminacy.” (Dio, 457)

What conclusions might one draw from such a statement? That someone, presumably assigned male at birth and possessing the genitalia that tends to promote that assignment, identified so strongly with femininity that they desired to cut off the part of their body that conflicted with that identification. 

To a modern reader, this screams of transness, doesn’t it? What about this one: 

“He carried his lewdness to such a point that he asked the physicians to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body by means of an incision, promising them large sums for doing so.” (Dio, 471)

I mean. Insert Will Smith ta-da meme here. 

Cassius Dio, the third-century Roman chronicler who wrote the above quotes about the emperor Elagabalus, along with others indicating that Elagabalus saw herself as a woman, might be forgiven for not having a view of sex and gender in line with our modern understandings. 

Martijn Icks, though? The author of The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor, does not use the word transgender—or even transvestite or transsexual—in his book once. It was published in 2011. 

Ick’s negligence is not the only case; the recentness of it only makes it the most egregious I’ve yet found. Why does it never seem to occur to Icks, or to the countless other people writing books on sex and gender, or biographies of people who “cross-dressed”, that the people featured in their research might have been trans? After having read so much of this obfuscation—from Michael Baker arguing that Radclyffe Hall believed themselves to be a man in a woman’s body in order to justify their sexual orientation toward women, to Rudolf Dekker positing that women who repeatedly dressed as men despite being arrested and run out of towns over and over again where doing so to follow soldier lovers, or for economic security, or because they were lesbians—I’m inclined to agree with Bambi L. Lobdell, the author of the 2012 biography of Joseph Israel Lobdell, A Strange Sort of Being (emphasis mine):

“Lobdell’s attempts to name himself and craft an identity from the concepts and terms available at the time were seized first by nineteenth-century psychiatric authorities, and later by twentieth- and twenty-first century theorists who denied Lobdell’s voice and dismissed his words in various exercises of identity piracy grounded in traditional assumptions of sexed bodies.” (124)

Joseph Lobdell is one of those figures in history who is commonly figured as an early lesbian hero. He fled an abusive marriage as a youth and from that point on, always maintained that he was a man, though it led to him being arrested, threatened, run out of town, and finally incarcerated in an insane asylum for over thirty years, until his death in 1912.

Bambi Lobdell, in her history of this distant relation of hers, frequently expresses the same shock I feel that second-wave feminists so consistently elide all of Joseph’s self-declarations in order to focus on the fact that he was born with a vagina, he married a person born with a vagina, and therefore, he was a female lesbian.

Academia is not immune from the biological essentialism that underpins western society. Martijn Icks is not unsympathetic to Elagabalus, who was placed on the Roman throne at age 14 and assassinated at 18. Icks spends most of his book examining and critiquing the image of the young ruler as a licentious tyrant, in histories, in psychological case studies, and in art and literature. He describes especially the modern shift into viewing Elagabalus as a gay icon, who was deeply in love with the charioteer Hierocles and whose nuances are explored in modern plays and short stories that highlight the homosexual relationship. 

But is it a homosexual relationship, if Elagabalus said to a lover, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady” (Dio, 469)? 

Even if Icks would have come to the same conclusion, viewing Elagabalus as a queer boy, the fact that in the year of our lord 2011 he didn’t acknowledge the possibility that the emperor was what we would today call transgender, while citing her desire for a surgically created vagina, shows at best an intellectual negligence that undermines his other conclusions, and at worst a deliberate interest in erasing transgender people from history. 

In researching for The Life and Times of Trans People, we’ve come across many people whose gender is as obscure to us as it may have been to them, and to their contemporaries. But there are just as many who seem obvious: Elagabalus, yearning for a vagina and asking to be called Lady, queen, empress. Joseph Lobdell, who rioted naked in jail cells for days at a time rather than put on female clothes. James Barry, who lived his entire adult life as a man and expressly prohibited any examination of his body after death.

Yet in the academic literature Elagabalus is a pervert tyrant, Joseph Lobdell at best a persecuted lesbian or at worst an insane woman; and James Barry is either an early feminist—but certainly not a male one—or, as Rachel Holmes posits in Scanty Particulars, an intersex person.

The simplest answer is that Elagabalus, Joseph Lobdell, and James Barry were transgender. They saw themselves as a different gender from the one assigned to them at birth, and they lived according to their truths. It’s a great shame that those truths seem to be invisible.

Books mentioned:

Baker, Michael. Our Three Selves: the Life of Radclyffe Hall. London: GMP Publishers Ltd, 1985.

Cocceianus, Cassius Dio. Dio's Roman History. Translated by Earnest Cary. Vol. 9. London: William Heinemann, 1927.

Dekker, Rudolf M., and Lotte Constance van de. Pol. The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe. New York: St. Martins Press, 1997.

Holmes, Rachel Scott Russell. Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Queen Victoria’s Most Eminent Military Doctor. New York: Random House, 2002.

Icks, Martijn. The Crimes of Elagabalus: the Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy Emperor. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2011.

Lobdell, Bambi L. "A Strange Sort of Being": The Transgender Life of Lucy Ann/Joseph Israel Lobdell, 1829-1912. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &, 2012.

Pressure. Balance. Patience. Inspiration.

There are few things worse than finally getting to start a project and then, when you sit down to do it, feeling as though you’re not up to the task.

Like many writers and artists, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the number of ideas I have. This has been especially true as I’ve started painting (nearly) every day, thinking ahead and planning work more deliberately. When I worked mostly in watercolor, it was easy to have an idea and clear my schedule to work on it, and to finish it that day. Working in oil is not like that for me. It can be, and I probably should practice more alla prima (“at first attempt,” or basically, in one session). But so far my being accustomed to working in layers, and my stamina, means that my oil paintings take several sessions. And in between those sessions, I keep having ideas for new paintings.

In some ways, this is exciting. Having several paintings going at once means cycling through them, having something to share while something else is drying. I just finished one that will have to cure for several weeks before I varnish it, then dry again for weeks before I present it; but in the meantime I’ll be starting something new and I’ll be able to share the progress of that. But as the number of projects—as the number of ideas builds up, it begins to feel as if I’m stacking little bricks of inspiration into a wall around me. And by the time I have the freedom to start work on a painting or a manuscript I’ve been thinking about for awhile, a brick at the bottom of the wall, I begin to doubt whether I can pull it off—or out, as the metaphor goes—and the whole wall threatens to come tumbling down.

What is it that makes the stakes seem so terribly high? So what if the wall falls—the bricks will be fine, just stack them again. For me, as someone who needs to start selling things—manuscripts, paintings, commissions—the pressure is high to choose something to finish soon, to choose the right thing to finish soon, to choose the thing that will sell best to finish soon so that I can start earning money while finding the next right thing.

My goal for this year is to just try. To take opportunities, even if I think I’m not ready for them. To stop worrying so much about trying to time things right or line up my ducks just so, because no amount of finagling has thus far managed to appease my anxieties about my skills. In the meantime, my solution to managing the pressure to sell is to choose my projects based not on whether I think they’re the most marketable, but whether they’re the most inspiring to me, because—as I tell myself—that is where I’ll be able to do my best work, and my best work is what will be most marketable. Whether it sells or not, that’s another matter. Whether I’m proud of it, whether I love it; that is what’s up to me.