A Letter On Authenticity

Stage 1: Denial

You will wake up one day a wiser eight or nine. It will click that there is an order to all the things. Perfectly organized cubbies in the classroom, a single file line, a place in the web of life, or food as you learn in science class. Although small you will doubt your smallness and conquer the backyard, the playground, and the grocery store with ease. Science and art fair medals will decorate you as a veteran, playmates will fear you in dodgeball face-offs, and siblings will revere you as some sort of deity. You’ll think to yourself that you can never grow to behave like your mom or your teacher. Your brain interprets their jobs as silly, why work for a graphic design company when you could be a princess? And why work for an angry boss when you could simply run away. You think often about running away even though all you have experienced in life is a series of lucky successes. 

In Mrs. Albertson’s class one day you will ask to use the bathroom, instead choosing to aimlessly wander the halls in search of an exit. You have no concept of authority even as a generally abiding girl and think nothing of the alarm blinking at the top of the door. The world is calling, and school feels like shoes that are too tight, you want to untie them and run around barefoot. Mom says you need to learn to tie your shoes properly or you’ll be wearing Velcro to college. You have no idea what Velcro is, but you can only hope it’s more comfortable than regular laced shoes. At this point, you’ve been out of class for about 20 minutes and your teacher has started to worry, you know this because another teacher’s radio blares a code in the hallway. You can tell by Mrs. Albertson's tone of voice that you need to get back immediately, but another thought enters your mind: if you open the door, they might stop looking for you. The alarm goes off immediately and you instantly regret the choice. Your art teacher, Mrs. Calhoun, races down the hall at warp speed, instantly grabbing your hand and bringing you back to 3rd grade science. You are still learning about the food webs and wonder what it is keeping the animals in that system. Like everything else, the door is a trap. You think to yourself, why is it always a trap? It dawns on you that every door leads to something else you must do: school, going to bed at night, or coming inside from playing. Everything you wish you didn’t have to leave is guarded, and the only way forward is to go through, following the line leader with everyone else. 

After school you play pretend until it's time for dinner, your mom will look at you with eyes brimming with tears while you act out a future in the backyard. Mrs. Albertson will tell you that becoming a famous singer or a horse is a real possibility. Only after the next unit in science, after the food-webs, will you realize horses are in fact a different species altogether and unlikely to converge with humans. Ever. You will tell your mother your plan to become something more realistic, a veterinarian, and she will tell you to stop picking her flowers off the bushes. Thinking about it, you don’t want the flowers to die, you attempt to put the bloom back on.

Stage 2: Anger

After a few passing years, you will come to know seasons, moon-tides, and emotions better. Mia will begin to grow breast buds, and you will ask your mom about wearing camisoles to prevent wandering eyes upon your own flat chest. The boys in class will begin to shoot up like bean sprouts and the girls will bloom into flowers, leaving you, a stubborn weed, left out. You will decide to start journaling to document these feelings, charting your growth and the growth of your breasts, spoiler alert there is none. In one entry you write a letter to your future self about retaining your authenticity. But the pages get torn out, crumpled, and lost in the back of a drawer somewhere, the scorned penmanship of a little girl. A little girl who has no hopes of becoming a veterinarian anymore and instead just wants school to let out forever. You will long for the forest, the beach, the playground, but now recess is 10 minutes long, so naturally you listen to your iPod nano for 10 minutes and attempt to look satisfied. 

You try to find a group of friends that feel like you do, but none of them ever seem to catch on. Mia abandons you in exchange for the cute new boy named Nate, she tells you stories of heavy petting and French kisses. You wonder if your first kiss will be French too and if French kissing has anything to do with actually speaking the language. Other friends come and go but feeling understood will seldom occur. This period of life is ostracizing, and blooming late couldn’t prove more of a social hinderance. One day during lunch the boys will insist on playing fuck, marry, kill. While part of you wants to brush off their behavior, taking it as a sign of their maturity, you can’t help but listen. You wonder if your name will come up, what they will say about you, and if one of them will name you worthy of their fucking, marrying, or killing. The mental gymnastics that follow are almost as bad as real gymnastics and you decide that intellectualizing your feelings will make these situations less fatal to your pre-teen ego. After all, they never chose to spare you.

Despite becoming somewhat of a social pariah during these years, your sixth-grade history teacher takes a liking to you and starts letting you eat lunch in her classroom. Mrs. Schaffer indulges your flood of questions about world geography, even the ones that reveal what you are really looking for. You ask about religions of the far east and hidden cultural truths, and she always obliges. One day you realize you never ask Mrs. Schaffer about herself, and as you depart take notice of a vase of dead flowers on her desk. The flowers remind you of her past as a girl much like yourself. It isn’t teacher appreciation day, but you decide to bring her some fresh ones the next day all the same. 

Stage 3: Bargaining

Between the years of high school and college, you will attempt to scrape together meaning. Clubs, social groups and sports teams will coerce you into membership, but it may never feel right. Mom will tell you college is the answer, Dad will agree with mom, and you will start taking classes in the fall. Friends will introduce you to alcohol, marijuana and the fantastic world of psychedelics but the high only lasts so long. Staying true to your childhood letter about authenticity will seem naive, since you hadn’t had enough experience to merit that sort of writing, not to mention the horrible grammar you’d used. Holding out on big decisions seems the most efficient waste of time, even if it is just that, a waste. You don’t really care and throw away twenty-dollar bills on nights out at the club and DIY tie-dye kits so you can tell people you made something out of nothing. If only that were true.

You become divine lord of situationships, allowing people to manhandle your psyche while you float about preaching the gospel of your father’s cynicism. Things spiral out of control, and you become a slave to your relationships in order to avoid thinking about your future. You only decide your year and half long one-sided friendship is worth leaving after the girl, Hallie, makes you miserable to the point of blacking out in various frat houses. After that relationship, you choose another master and remain emotionally enslaved for another year, indulging delusions including “being an alcoholic doesn’t count if it's the year of your 21st birthday” and “people who major in math are interesting.” Time slips away from you, and you realize you wasted your emotional intelligence on people who couldn’t invest in something if their 401k depended on it. For a while you call it quits on relationships with people, choosing instead to present as an enigmatic stranger at local bars frequented by “edgy” adults who listen to punk rock and invite you into unwanted ménage à trois.

Strangers ask you questions, ask you out, ask you what you want to do with yourself, and you begin to backtrack: “I’m going to be a veterinarian! Yeah...” with a smile and a nod. But then they ask what your current bachelors track in English is for and you wish you hadn’t strayed quite so far from the plan. Respite from questioning and expectation is found only in your 5-minute drive between your university campus and your apartment. The falling leaves invite you to join them in a happier state, that you know would remain constant. If only you could grow up to be a leaf.

Stage 4: Depression

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in English, you will contemplate getting a masters “for the fuck of it” knowing well enough you can’t face getting a 9-5 job. Ironically, you update your LinkedIn profile daily hoping to hear back from the 15 or so internships you applied for in the hopes of gaining a useful experience i.e. running coffee to women named Krystyn who smoke Virginia Slims. In the meantime, you run the local Starbucks with an iron-fist, running coffee to women named Krystyn, among many others, who may or may not smoke cigarettes (Starbucks is a no smoking establishment). Things begin to feel more cynical, and you post on your Instagram story about missing recession pop music. The search history of your computer is equally concerning with recent visits including: “r/doomsday” and “how to lose 20 pounds in a week.” The days fade into each other and your vision is getting worse, you book an appointment with your eye doctor because you can’t see yourself going anywhere. 

On a brighter note, you finally have a better-than-decent boyfriend, and he likes to go camping in the woods. Jake is peaceful and down to earth in a way you have never been. He walks barefoot when you go for walks outside, leaves flowers on their respective bushes, and he hates Velcro. Most importantly though he understands you in a way that Mia, Hallie, and all the rest of them never could. He feels the restrictions of aging in much the same way you do, playing coy to things like working full-time and the drone of social niceties. He is nice though, never letting his opinions thwart that personality of sunshine he possesses that can warm the coldest of rooms, the most skeptical of hearts. You can hate the world you live in together and perhaps make your own that you like a bit more. After all, you both disagree with the deceptive marketing society presents to children, the incessant preaching of the American dream, tales of becoming a success story with nothing to show for it. You both agree you would have been better off trying to become princesses, or even horses. 

The two of you stroll through the forest and collect fallen flowers, nuts, and pinecones, he encourages the practice, finding beauty in your quiet contemplation. He smiles and says you will do great things, followed by a comment that you seem happiest when you are silent. Looking at your hands filled with life's treasures, you decide to believe him and nod.

Stage 5: Acceptance

After a camping trip, you and your boyfriend return home. The time you had spent together, at the edge of the lake, provided ample space for revelation and you felt yourself slipping into a spiritual sense of acceptance. Watching the numerous tadpoles at the water's surface you recognized their fates would all be the same. The flowers blooming beside the reeds would live on after your arrival, before their eventual fading into the lake. You no longer cared about the regulatory splendor other people seemed so indebted to. You never needed it. The tadpoles leading the way as corporate CEOs, famous artists, celebrities, family men and women, or teachers would all fade into the distant shimmer of the water just as you would in your own journey. Yours was a journey of contemplation, understanding, and growth and perhaps that meant enough. In living out your days there was comfort, not in the idea that you had made something out of yourself, but rather that you had found something within yourself. 

You quit your soulless job cold turkey and decide what you love most in this world is growing. After that, you take things a step further and delete LinkedIn, as it was definitely for the best. You tell your friends you love them more often now. A greenhouse for sale on Facebook marketplace provides an endearing new project and life finally starts to feel like science fair medals and dodgeball again. Your nature has mellowed as you embrace a new meaning for personal success. Little things matter more to you and a falling petal once again reads as poetry.

 It’s springtime and your lease is about to expire in your apartment. A call from your mom implores you to venture home and collect some old furniture from your childhood room in the hopes of sprucing up the new apartment you will soon move into. Upon arrival the room envelopes you in its familiar atmosphere, it's just as you left it all those years ago. You sit on your mattress tracing the leaves embroidered into the patchwork quilt and sigh. Out of the corner of your eye glints the brass hardware of your little desk drawer, you feel inexplicably drawn to it and open it with care. Sifting through its contents, you reread old birthday cards, unpeel sticky notes and look upon unfinished song lyrics. At the very bottom, crumpled into the corner, rests a wad of pages from what appears to be your childhood diary. You smile softly as you recognize the rushed handwriting of a little girl. You peel back the petals, and the top of the page reads: A Letter on Authenticity. 

Flowers bud,

 bloom, 

and fall to the floor. 

You read that again.

You read the letter again.