The Pit Traps of Authenticity and Stasis

You don’t owe your fifteen year old self anything

We were told to venture forth, find our purpose and change the world.

Most of us found tote bags.

Authenticity turned into a performance review.

You curate a self, then spend years feeding it the finest ramen you can afford. Then the causes and hobbies, aesthetics and virtues you publicly align yourself with becomes a cloak you can’t unbuckle. The smiles and applause feel like confirmation that the cake you’ve carefully built, layer by layer, has worth and purpose. A deep and meaningful cake, wise beyond its years. But they’re just applauding you for staying on script.

You’re born a person, before long You’re a detergent brand with a pulse. A reality TV contestant trying to best guess what to say to whom, at what time, to keep yourself close enough to the centre of the social circle that you don’t get exiled at the next vote. Armed only with a primitive brain, no better equipped to save yourself than your ancestors sixty thousand years before you were.

You’re not sure exactly why you need to find purpose and convince strangers of your authenticity, but you know that if you don’t they’ll buy another detergent brand and you’ll find yourself in the discount bin with the Dubai chocolate scented Labubus.

Stasis is the shy twin.

We call it peace, but it’s often fear. A long hibernation where you confuse safety with meaning. Years pass quietly, nothing truly bad happens, nothing truly good either. You wake up one morning and realise you’ve been living in the waiting room, scrolling through Friends horoscope memes, trying to figure out if you’re really a Virgo or a Libra who was born too soon, because you’re sure as hell not a Monica.

We need seasons. Seasons of growth, seasons in the burrow.

A flower blossoms and dies, dies and blossoms.

So says a sutra. One of them, I forget which. Because of its size and history, China has collected an immense number of Buddhist sutras over two millennia. Thousands. Tens of thousands. There are as many seasons as there are sutras.

The important thing is not that you can align where you are at any exact time in your journey with a specific season or sutra that someone else has written about in detail, with hundreds of hours of walkthroughs on YouTube to direct you towards someone else’s nirvana. But to live unburdened by what you expected your journey would be when you were first building your detergent brand as a child.

You don’t owe your fifteen year old self the life they imagined. You owe your present self a life of substance.

If you’re stuck, slash and burn. Do something you can’t post. Don’t do something unforgivable with a wood chipper in a Pets at Home car park, but wet your teeth. Taste blood in a way that a member of right thinking society would say you’d be unable to be domesticated again after.

Let some of your former identity wash off in the shower the following morning.

You’re allowed to become someone your past audience wouldn’t recognise. A brand of detergent beyond their palette.

Bring your honest weather.
Shoreline salt, honeyed grapefruit and ash.
Name the night by touch, not maps.
The soft riot of your breath in the cold wind.
The fawn curled in long grass, warm and unafraid.
A tremor of stars in a McDonald’s carpark.
Anything alive moves.
Under your skin the moon is alive.