How To Not Be Lonely

 So far, you’ve offered the following categories in your self-definition: “confident and extroverted (but faking it for approval)”, and that implies “self-doubting, shy and insecure”, which you didn’t say but can easily be inferred from what you have said.

Having classified yourself as shy and insecure, which you deem unacceptable, you’re compensating by trying to “mock-up” confident-and-extroverted, but all of this pretending isn’t working, right?

Authenticity works. But what is authenticity?

It turns out that’s not such a simple nut to crack. On the surface, it means “not pretentious”, and that’s important, but it’s not the entire story. Still, it’s a place to start: stop pretending. Stop fooling yourself and stop trying to fool others. 

Step #1:

That peels the outer layer of the onion, but there’s more to go. If you stop pretending, if you stop believing your own distorted thinking about who you are, or cooking up distorted public presentations to feed to others, you will felt “exposed”: naked, vulnerable.

Without your public facade, your inner doubts will be visible to others, yes? Instead of that fake-confident smile, people will see uncertainty and a sense that you’re not sure how to be in public, how to connect with others, or even [drumroll..] who you are.

Step #2: 

be brave. It takes courage to learn how to be yourself; it takes courage to even get a glimpse of who you actually are. You’ve spent so long lying to yourself and others that your grip on the truth is becoming tenuous, and making friends with the truth is going to be unnerving. So be brave.

Step #3:

Which is our opening line: “stop defining yourself?” That means “stop trying to find the right combination of labels and categories which represent ‘the real you’”. This is a pernicious and almost unavoidable nasty habit — it’s so deeply ingrained that we do it with almost no awareness that it’s going on. “Oh no, I don’t want to be that kind of person, I want to be this other person!”

Whatever those categories are, it doesn’t matter — the person you want to be, or the person you don’t want to be — it’s all noise. There is no category or combination of categories which can represent the true self. So if you’re interested in authenticity, this is another layer of the onion — you cannot ever be defined by coming up with a list of categories or attributes which tell you who you are.

Giving that up is like… super-scary. Someone needs a good deal of self-discipline and awareness to let go of the craving to establish their identity as some set of categories. You really have to double-down on denying the knee-jerk thinking, which makes this seem “natural”. It’s not natural, it’s corrosive of your ability to see who you really are. But it’s conditioned behavior, something we’ve all learned to do automatically.

There’s a trend-line here, yes? The trend is towards greater uncertainty that you know who you are. The more you can tolerate uncertainty about your identity, the closer you are to recognize true self, the more you have a shot at authenticity.

At some point, if you keep at it, the anxiety dies down. Uncertainty is not the same thing as anxiety — for most of us, when the ego is uncertain, the result is anxiety. You don’t like anxiety; I don’t like anxiety, nobody likes anxiety… that’s why we suppress our uncertainty and paint it over with the pretense of certainty. But a pretense of certainty is inauthentic, and cuts you off from others, which makes you… [drumroll again] lonely.

When you make peace with uncertainty — which is the truth — the anxiety dies down. The anxiety expresses your resistance to uncertainty. You really do not know who you are. Period. That’s the truth. That’s like maximum uncertainty about your identity. The anxiety comes because you don’t accept that truth; you think it’s not OK; you think it means that you're nobody or you’re not important or you’re not as good as others or… something terrible.

But it’s not terrible, it’s just the truth. It means nothing that you don’t know who you are, it’s just a neutral fact. It’s like “rocks are hard, water is wet, and you do not know who you are.” You probably don’t know Neil Armstrong’s shoe size either, right? So what? It’s really OK to not know. It is not the end of the world.

When you can accept that you don’t know who you are, that’s getting to be fairly authentic. When you can be open about that — when you don’t have to pretend about it for public approval, that’s even more authentic. Now you’re able to make some serious friends, because… of course… this is all true about your peers. They don’t know who they are, so you’ve got a lot in common. Plenty of basis for a relationship there.

There is a kind of punchline about this: while you’ve been molding your persona for public approval, that has been like pouring acid on your ability to form authentic bonds with other humans. When you stop doing that and can make peace with the unknown, that allows you to connect to others — you’re no longer so self-involved and preoccupied with the validation of your ego, so you’re available to listen, to care, to create with others. To make friendships, etc.

Isn’t that just the strangest thing? Kind of the opposite of what, right?

Anyway. That’s not the end of authenticity, but it’s a pretty good beginning.