Authenticity or acting

 A couple years ago -- or no, it looks like almost three -- I wrote about my company's Diversity Day and the slogan "Bring your whole self to work!" As you may remember (or can just imagine) I was against it. You can follow the link to see what I said at the time.

But we had another presentation today, this one on "Giving to Yourself," that said what might almost have been the same thing in a different way. After establishing why it's good to give yourself the things you need (it lowers your stress, makes you less likely to burn out, makes you less cranky around others, and therefore actually improves your performance and sociability), the presenter had a couple of slides of "small steps" -- things you can start doing to get into the habit of self-care. And the very last one on the list was, "Be yourself." The notes I took gloss that as "not trying to be the person others expect you to be."

This sounds awfully close to "bringing your whole self to work," but it struck me very differently. And after some reflection I see why. It all turns on the meaning of the word self.

• When I heard "Bring your whole self to work," I understood my self to include all the baggage that defines where I stand in relationship to other people: my family and friendships and loves, my hobbies and beliefs, my successes and failures. All the stuff that makes up a life. All the things that Nietzsche once called "finery." I thought of these things because the examples used in the company's literature on the subject talked about letting your office colleagues know about your kids, and that you are active in coaching Little League. And that's fine, I guess, except that my office colleagues already know all the things I care to share publicly about my kids. On the other hand, the things I don't share are things I'd rather keep that way. 
  
  
• But when I heard "Be yourself" in the sense of "be authentic," I understood my self to mean just me, without all that other stuff. And that set me thinking in a whole different direction.

I think I have said before* that my father was an actor, and that he chose acting as an avocation** because he found he was already acting all the time in real life anyway. So why not take the opportunity to do something he did reflexively and get applause for it at the same time? The critical part here is not that he acted on stage or in front of cameras, but that he never stopped: even when the stage was dark and the cameras were off, even when he had gone home, even in the Real World. He admitted this to me a few times, when it was late and he was really drunk and we were sitting up talking. And I even thought I could see it in subtle ways.

• He didn't remember what you told him, unless it was what he already thought you were going to tell him; in fact, he often remembered what he thought you were going to say instead of — and as vividly as if it were — what you really did say. At the time I found this endlessly frustrating, but some time in the last few years I realized that it may have been because he was waiting for his cue. He couldn't actually pay attention to the substance of what you were saying, to the reality here and now, because he was trying to figure out when in the script he was supposed to break in and what his character was supposed to say. Therefore the only things he could remember were based on his understanding of his character and yours; which means that he remembered you saying what he thought you were supposed to say. If he misunderstood you on something important, it might take a very long time to disabuse him.
  
  
• I watched him over the years adopt different personalities. When I was young he was a Liberal Intellectual. Later he became a Business Owner, which meant adopting some caricatured attitudes that were obviously what he thought a Business Owner ought to believe. When he acted in community theater in middle age, he took on the role of Jovial Dirty Old Man … I mean, not onstage but when he was pretending to be real, offstage or back stage. And I specifically remember times when he was being a Jovial Dirty Old Man that he said and did things for which he used to have the deepest scorn back when he was a Liberal Intellectual.
  
  Naturally I understand that people in the Real World change their opinions; it is a cliché that liberals turn conservative when they get older. But it is a lot less common for people to start doing things that used to disgust them. Disgust is something more than simple disagreement, something a lot stronger and more visceral. That insight is part of what helped me to understand that the Jovial Dirty Old Man was just a mask … and therefore so was the Business Owner, … and (in time I accepted) so was the Liberal Intellectual. (Since the Liberal Intellectual was the mask he wore when I was very young, I long thought it must be the reality. But I finally concluded that it was no more real than the others.)    

My father lived this way most of the time, and I don't think he understood there was any alternative. If I had to guess, I would speculate that it was a style he adopted very young, out of self-defense. His mother was a strong and overbearing personality who disciplined him inconsistently, and he was an only child; it would have been only natural for him to study how he had to act to get on her good side. He was smart in school and therefore got advanced to higher grades when he was still physically small; it would have been only natural for him to study how he had to act to avoid being beat up. I'm pretty sure that this Peanuts cartoon from the 1950's is how my dad survived elementary school.

I have almost lost touch with my original topic, but not quite. The point in all this is that yes, my dad was very good at living this way because he had done it all his life, but it didn't make him happy! He was very lonely, and I think this was because he could never be real with anyone. He could never afford to talk heart-to-heart with his friends, because he was always trying to entertain them. I think he tried to drop the mask with my mother. And on rare occasions (usually when he was very drunk) he tried to drop it with me. I assume he also tried with my brother. He sometimes seemed to believe that he had a right to expect or demand intimacy inside the nuclear family. 

But even when he wanted to drop the mask, and it wasn't often, he wasn't very good at it because he had no practice. It's not easy or automatic to learn how to be real with other people. You have to work at it. And I don't mean just intimacy. Because if you find that you can be real with your intimates, then you can start being real (in a more guarded way, to be sure) with acquaintances and even strangers. This doesn't mean you share the details of your love life with them. But it might mean you know what your opinions are, and that you are not afraid to state them. Or if you think your opinions will cause a distraction, if (say) you hold a minority political view in your office and still have to work cordially with your colleagues, knowing how to be real in your private life can give you more confidence to wave the topic away rather than trying to improvise an answer that you think people will like. 

This is a lesson that I am still learning, because I grew up imitating my dad. For the first three decades of my life, I didn't know what my own opinions were. (See, e.g., here, where I discuss topics related to this at considerable length.) It took me many long years to find my way out of that life and into a realer one. It's not easy, but it is so much better a way to live. And in a way I'm sorry I didn't understand this soon enough to try to help him find it too. Of course it would have been complicated, because there were so many other layers to our relationship as well. I might never have been able to explain it to him. But it is a damned shame that he never figured it out on his own!

If that's what Authenticity means, then I'm all for it. If that's what it means to Bring Your Whole Self to Work -- that and not all the colorful baggage -- then I have to accept that's OK too.

* But I will probably never be able to find it. This blog has lasted long enough for me to realize the indexing is very poor, and when I want to cross-reference an earlier post it can take me a lot of time to find it. So I may end up repeating stories just because I can't identify that I already told them a decade ago. Sorry.

** Only in midlife was he able to make it a vocation too, to try to earn a living from it. That part never worked out very well, any more than any of his earlier career ventures worked out.