Wanting
to be authentic gets complicated by the secrets I keep. In almost every
context, every relationship, there are certain things that can't be
said. Sometimes it is because I am protecting myself. Other times, I am
keeping secrets to protect someone else.
Whatever the reason, I am
beginning to wonder if authenticity is ever really possible. To a
large degree, our identity is socially constructed.
What we accept as real, what we value, what we know, is all to a certain
extent something that is determined by our culture, our context, our
relationships with others, our secrets.
As Desmond Tutu said in a speech I heard him give, we need other humans
to know how to be human. Without them, we wouldn't know the
simplest of things, like how to speak or what to eat. In
the beginning of our lives, we wouldn't survive without the help of
others. Maybe it is this earliest dependence that keeps us from
ever being able to exist outside our relationships with
them, meaning there will always be things we can't say.