WHERE IS MY AUTHENTICITY GONE? Pt. 3

This was the me I feared the most. He was the cunt. And in that moment I had a terrible realisation I was loving being the cunt.

The road wound down a steep hill, past the lines of huts and the one-storey wooden structure of the old Esalen Institute Lodge. In his quest to understand the origins of our Western ideas of the Self, Will Storr, author of ‘Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed’,  had come here to experience first-hand the ideals and principles of core authenticity I discussed in Part 2 of this article. Of his fascinating recounting, I would like to extract a scene that characterizes a positive, albeit brief shift of the Self we can all access and provoke when feeling the suffocating effects of our highly conditioned ideas of ourselves. An opportunity for inner movement and psychological growth.

It is the second day of Will’s retreat, and workshop leader Paula Shaw has instructed all participants to inhabit fully and without reserve the version of their Selves they fear the most. One woman will have to be an authoritarian police officer and prowl the Institute in mirrored glasses, a man in his thirties will need to slip into the state of his volatile Vietnam veteran father who had drawn a gun on him when he was three, and author Will Stor will have to be a mischievous fourteen years old he had disowned on his way to adulthood.

In this landscape of feared personalities, and in the dressing-up room in the laundry area, Will take sight of an old ripped Metallica T-Shirt that might just fit him. Still unsure of the ultimate wisdom  of the processes he is submitting himself to, he puts the t-shirt back into the ‘give aways’ box and turns around when, the authoritarian police woman, eighteen-inch truncheon in hand, approaches:

“You’re gonna put that on right now, motherfucker!”

Startled, Will freezes in his track, but then just behind the police woman, he notices a large laundry cart:

“Officer, could I offer you a lift down to the Big Yurt?”

“You bet!” says the woman laughing in delight.

As gravity takes its effect and they run faster and faster over the bumpy tarmac path, Will, astonished how quick the ride back into his mischievousness Self was, is beginning to feel the joyful notes of his foolish misbehavior. And as the two arrive at destination, he notices in the corner of his eye a goat tied to a tree.

“Brilliant!”, he thinks, and spurred on by the cheers of his new very ‘authentic’ mates, he goes and unties the goat. Planning his escape through the strawberries fields ahead, Will begins to savior the phantasies of a life lived in this way, when, a voice from behind him:

”Excuse me! You’re going to need to bring that goat back right now!” says a woman whose look Will knows all too well from his naughty days of youth.

"Sorry, very sorry!”, answers Will feeling ridiculous in his new outfit.

Is Will’s view onto the fields of a less constrained Self about to close? Maybe not just yet, for in the next couple of days, through this and other experiences, and to his own surprise, he will have the terrible realisation that he actually loves being “the lonely, angry, weirdo cunt” he had concluded to be earlier in life, and that he had disowned.

What you have turned into is something like your mother or your father, but with a new layer on top that makes you feel modern

So you wake up one morning and realize that you’re not the person you wanted to be. You’re someone else. You wonder how it happened. When you were young, it seemed as if the future was as open as the prairie, that you could roam wherever you wanted, be whoever you decided. But now you find yourself a very particular kind of person, with a very particular set of strengths and flaws, a particular world-view and a particular plate of moods and responses. I have my own stories of ‘out-of-character’ behavior I felt a relieving joy for. Whether it was dangerously crossing over a gate very early in the morning to avoid boarder guards in China, foolishly film industrial beehives without protection and getting stung 15 times all over my face and neck, or even getting into my first fight in my life with a film crew while crossing some remote nature in Turkey, something that could have gotten me in a lot of trouble, the lasting impression that stays with me is both one of a smile on my face, and an empowering sense of the transient nature of my ideas of myself. A wake up call that who I thought I had become had still a lot of room for experimentation.Strangely enough, and perhaps ironically, engaging with behaviour that falls out of line with the Self we uncritically assume to presently inhabit, produces a sense of freedom not unlike that of Esalen’s seekers looking for the eternal god-like Self. As we experience the out of character behavior, and live through the emotions that these new behaviors imply, we throw light onto the origin of our sense of self, and the ways in which we age through the forces of cultural beliefs, in the same way that those who seek the never-changing authentic Self do. And so this can be a refreshing new experience, one not unlike the kind of fresh insights I promote in my clients in talk therapy.

Having said this, while these examples show us that there is indeed a malleability to our behavior and our ideas of the self, it does us no harm to be critical of the conditions in which these had emerged. In the story of Will Stor and my own, the originality of our behaviors mirrored the temporality of the conditions we were immersed in, and the expectations that came along with it. The conditions that supported us were not stable cultural processes, but experimental and highly ephemeral ones. In the case of Stor, change was the sole focus of his intentions, and the environment he was in, built for the expression of the extraordinary. And even then, the only change he experienced was that of a return to his familiar roots. In my case, finding myself abroad in a cultural space of which norms I did not understand yet, allowed me to experiment with behaviors I had not created a normative reference for, and for which the local population would temporarily close an eye on. Ignorance acted temporarily as a blessing, in a group I had yet to build any dependency on, and in which I held the privileged position of visitor.

I am in the business of self-change, and it is in my interest to believe that the Self is infinitely malleable, but in my opinion brutal truths pay more dividends than ideological beliefs. So while the English-speaking people of the 60s became feverish with the idea that all of society’s problems, from unemployment to child abuse, could be solved by teaching people how to uncover their authentic god-like selves, it is worth mentioning that the Esalen leaders had not only failed to demonstrate, in their own selves, the efficacy of what they preached, but had even, as Will Stor writes: “exhibited a tyrannical refusal to acknowledge the existence of a world larger than the Self”. The many suicides and violent acts implicated with the work of the institute brought their spiritual quest for purity  to its knees, and with it, a definitive scar on the idea of Self-control.

So is change really possible? And if it is, can it be preserved over time? Read Part 4 to learn why change comes at a cost, and why commitment and  sacrifices to maintain it, are an essential part of the desire to be a better version of yourself.

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko