Fire or Fear

I'd like to begin this post by declaring myself the true champion of the Procrastination Games. Thank you, thank you - I am not proud. Sorry! 

Now onto the new post - today I will be writing about Authenticity. 

A quick Goodle search will tell you that the word “authenticity” means to be authentic. Why, thank you, Google, that’s exactly as profound and comprehensive a definition as I was hoping to find. Not one to accept defeat easily, and after a quick brainstorming session, I discovered that the definition of “authentic” is “to be honest or real”.

Ah, real…a word thrown around so aggressively these days. Often in order to put something or someone else down so that everybody else can know that the user of the word is in possession of a lot of depth and character. Or simply to hide behind social justice while actively disenfranchising everybody else because #insecurities. You can easily identify these people because they’re always going on about real music and real women and real whatever else, forever damning everything outside their definition of real to the realm eternal non-existence.

But I digress…

What I am interested in is my decision to dedicate the rest of my 2016 to the pursuit of authenticity, aka the pursuit of complete and total honesty in my dreams and intentions. I want to make choices that are true to who I am as person, what I believe in and what I stand for. I want to like the things I like because I like them; I want to do things because I want to do them; and I want to say things because I mean them.

So, in order to be as authentic as possible, I have created The Manifesto on Being Authentic.

This list could easily be ten times longer, but ultimately, my pursuit of authenticity will depend on my ability to be unapologetically myself. 

Darker Side by Rhodes

I was listening to Darker Side by Rhodes when I started thinking about what the song means. The obvious conclusion is that it is a love song about loving someone and all the worst parts of them. But I like to think of it as a kind of self-love song. “Oh, my darker side/ I’ll find your light/ I know you better than them”. My thinking is that at the end of the day, nobody knows you like you know yourself and I don’t think that anybody will ever understand the darkest parts of you better than you can yourself. 

So it is up to us to find the light, to look at the darkness and deal with it and try to heal it. In a bid to love ourselves, I think many of us think that the only way to do that is to celebrate the good parts and neglect the bad parts – treating them like they do not exist. However, I think the point of loving yourself is to love yourself completely, warts and all. By sending love to the parts of ourselves we like least we may transform them into something better. We can nurture the ugly parts so that we can grow beyond them, so that they can become less ugly and so that they can learn to take in some light.

If we keep being hard on ourselves for how jealous, petty, unforgiving and whatever other negative words we ascribe to ourselves, we can only add to the negativity and make it worse and ourselves more bitter. But I reckon if we can love our entire selves more completely, we can shed enough light on the ugly parts so that they are not so ugly anymore. These parts may always be with us but because we will have chosen self-love over self-loathing, they will be stripped of their power and they may blossom into something good. That jealousy will turn into appreciation and that lack of forgiveness will turn into empathy. Like weeds we cannot completely get rid of, they will bloom into a forest of flowers on the side of the road that contribute to the scenery on the journey we are on. Maybe not in the way that was anticipated but maybe in the way that it was intended. My point is that nothing and no one is perfect but denying the bad parts to make is seem that way, will not make it so.

I realise that this post is probably riddled with mixed metaphors but I hope you can understand what I was trying to say.

M

x

Darker Side by Rhodes