Are the goals of being authentic and acting like the person you want to be contradictory? Or are they the same?
I’ve been reading The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin recently. I’ll have a lot more to say about it once I’ve finished and start it again for the second time. I thought it might annoy me, but SO much of what she writes resonates with me.
But I was confused by these two ideals. Being authentic has been one of my goals for this year. I’m not sure I’ve mastered it; in fact, I’m sure I haven’t. But I’m doing much better than I was. On the other hand, can I be better than who I am? Is it being authentic to act like the person I want to be?
While at first I believed these to be contradictory, I have decided that striving to be a better me is certainly being authentic. It isn’t easy, and I will fail at it even more than I fail at being authentic, but, as I’ve seen, incremental steps do eventually add up.
I don’t promise to stop being so cranky, at least not immediately. But I’ll work on acting like the person I want to be, and that’s not a cranky one!
