Do you remember the book The Velveteen Rabbit (by Margery Williams) ?
I remember being touched by it when I was a kid. A stuffed animal rabbit becomes a living rabbit, because of being loved.
The problem with being real is that the world is not safe. It would be really nice if the world were safe. I wish the world were a place where everyone could be themselves openly, and experience nothing but appreciation, tolerance, and curiosity.
Unfortunately, people often look to other people as if they are mirrors to themselves- a way to measure oneself- which leads to judgment, hating in other people what one hates in oneself, etc. We use other people to try to work out pain that can only be addressed by seeing it for what it is, owned by oneself.
Anyway. I wish the world were not like that.
I’ve done a lot of work in my life, to attempt to stay real. I know I’m not perfect at it, but I remember choosing a career teaching music, partly because I hoped it would keep me from becoming jaded, or, rather, not force me to become jaded to survive.
One of my aspirations as a parent has been to try to protect and nurture our kids such that they feel free to be themselves. It’s a difficult thing and I know I’m not perfect at it.
The other edge of the sword of realness is the ability to be hurt, because to share oneself with the world authentically requires vulnerability. If all we ever show is a mask, then the attacks of others hit the mask. But if we’ve shown ourselves, attacks can hurt more.
It’s all very complicated. I used to judge people (I’m ashamed to admit) who seemed “fake.” People who seemed to be wearing a facade all the time. I used to think this represented a conflict in values, for me, and that they needed to be freed.
The thing is, we’re all just trying to survive, with whatever combination of masks, and the lack of masks, that allows us to do that.
Being real is something that intersects with boundaries, because it isn’t necessary (or necessarily even good) to be equally “real” with all people. Not all situations and relationships deserve someone’s realness, or are prepared for someone’s realness. Work relationships often explicitly only want whatever version of a person does their job best.
Anyway it’s just something I’m becoming increasingly aware of- this intersection between realness and boundaries. For a lot of my earlier life, I thought that the ideal was to be 100% authentic, 100% of the time, no matter what, and though in principal, this kind of sounds good, in reality, it lets people hurt you if they haven’t earned your trust, and can also lead to a lack of judgment and wisdom about how much to share, and when.
Legalism about realness can lead people to be obtuse. I see also that, for example, in the case of the current political climate, that the valuing of “realness” can embolden people to be openly cruel, if they’re “just being honest.” Valuing honesty, even when it rips other people to shreds, places a higher value on self than on the other person.
Taylor Swift wrote “casually cruel in the name of being honest.” Though she was talking about romantic rejection, I see people being increasingly openly racist, sexist, and hateful.
What am I getting at?
There’s a real conversation to be had, here. It involves respecting people for every way that they present themselves, including their masks, seeing them as coping mechanisms that may, at times, be appropriate, and at other times might not be appropriate. Someone who wears a “mask” in an interview to appear more confident than they are is one situation. Someone who wears a “mask” all the time with their spouse has a mismatch in objectives, if intimacy is a goal. Growing up as an evangelical, I thought my job was to “be light,” and to just… shine all the time “for Jesus.” That this was authenticity. It was very confusing and didn’t involve any real evaluation of boundaries, of what to share when, with whom. It was sort of… bare your soul…. “trust God to bring people to him.” Which sort of was connected to the belief that it was “good” or “right” to basically ignore natural boundaries, and ignore normal gradiations in relationships to immediately become more intimate with people than was natural, in order to try to guide them to a soul change– kind of a personal thing.
Anyway I’m unpacking all of this. I’m seeing how it confused me, how it put pressure on me, in some ways, to try to go to deep topics quickly, because I was taught the value at some point of judging everything superficial as “worldly.” That there were deep things that were important, and that everything else didn’t matter. This made me disconnect from people and from conversations that were light. This led me to judge myself and others. I also didn’t know, for a long time, how to have fun with people, or how to joke.
For a long time, I sort of made sense of my frustration regarding realness by spiritualizing it, thinking of verses like “for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12, ESV). I spiritualized the frustration of a lack of intimacy with people in my life, by thinking that really, I was “yearning for heaven.” In actuality, I didn’t have close friendships because I didn’t know how to be a good friend, for a long time, and also didn’t have a lot of time that I was spending with people that wasn’t supervised by adults.
I think a lot of people lack intimacy in their most important relationships, and it hurts.
I’m challenging myself to see things for what they are, including the harms that come from trampling boundaries or pretending that they don’t matter. I’m trying to un-pressure myself, when it comes to realness/depth/judgment. It isn’t easy to do.
I think that the real truth is that we are all real. We aren’t becoming real. We don’t make each other real. We are real right now. It can require a shift in mindfulness to feel it, and to feel the pain of being real, but we already are.
