Stop pretending and start being you

I grew up in the 1970s and learned a lot from that experience. Tom Wolfe called the 60s and 70s the "Purple Decade" because they were so flamboyant.

Style seemed important then, even more so than in other decades. Everyone of a certain age is free to try new things and express themselves.

Expressing yourself may sound like a good thing, but it really depends on what you're trying to express. Is it the real you or is it something you've borrowed from the people and styles around you?

Of course, most purple people think they're expressing their true selves, but I don't think so, even when young. I think most of the people in the 70s who were hip, trendy, earthen or sarcastic were putting on something - they were playing a role in a sense.

It was a mystery because they didn't look fake, but I knew there was something there that wasn't real.

My own purple patch

This way of being still exists for many people, and many years after the '70s ended, I realized that I had acquired some purple patches of my own. My purple version is a glib existentialist. In college, I was too arrogant: I was full of myself and had a smart mouth.

This is true of many college students, of course, but I had a particularly bad case that cost me a lot of potential friends. Besides, it lasted for a while after school. Eventually I found myself doing this and stopping, but I still don't understand the pattern.

When I was a knight, I was trying to prove something. My sarcasm and judgment, however witty they may be at times, are an attempt to fill a void inside me.

This emptiness comes from two sources: one is that I was rejected in high school by a girl I loved. The other is that during my adolescence, I did a poor job of exploring the world and finding my own taste and voice.

Honestly be someone I'm not

What I did to fill in the gaps was to borrow the style of an attractive friend, all the way up to his musical preferences. (Notably, The Who and Led Zeppelin.) I am not a false person - I sincerely (albeit unthinkingly) try to be someone I am not. It energizes me and helps me climb out of the depths of despair.

Years later, I realized that we purple people had unknowingly played a role. We just adopted the style of the media or our peers. This adoption is conscious -- no need to quote Freud or Jung here -- but it is not conscious. In other words, we "deliberately" feel without explicitly identifying the process.

I've thought about this for a long time -- about 40 years, in fact -- and call it "camouflage." A simple definition of faking is "the creation of an imaginary self according to a forged style".

Those fake styles, whether borrowed from Sylvester Stallone or Woody Allen, or some gorgeous guy you went to school with, are what makes purple a purple decade.

Loyal to the reality

The cure of faking is real, I think, but the term is problematic for me because to some it means "being true to yourself and your feelings". The problem is that a person's true self and feelings can be the fake type a person pretends to be.

Just recycling them doesn't help. Telling a person who has buried her spontaneous feelings under her imaginary self to be true to herself may paradoxically encourage her to indulge in the fantasy more, because she believes that her apparent self is her true self.

I break the knot of haste by saying that authenticity, properly understood, does not mean fidelity to your feelings, but fidelity to reality:

In the world

Your body

Others'

About your opinion

This shift in emphasis comes from recognizing that our feelings are - or should be - based on reality, not the separate phenomena we just had.

Manipulation of the... Our own

I don't believe that under normal circumstances we just feel things, but rather that our emotions are rooted in our perception and evaluation of situations. So if we want to get rid of fake feelings and develop real ones, we need to reach out to the world and engage with it.

But pretenders don't start with the world. Instead, when he tries to amuse himself or assuage his insecurities, he first comes up with the feeling or style he wants.

It's common to talk about how we sometimes manipulate others, but the person who manipulates most is ourselves. The trap the pretense falls into is that he tries too hard to control his own experience. He's forcing his feelings, even his identity, rather than letting things happen his way.

I'm a little wary of this phrase because "making things happen" sounds too passive to me. I'm not talking about passive processes. I mean actively exploring the world, rather than trying so hard to control your experience.

Put yourself at the center

If you do this, you can let things and people and your own reality really sink in and seep into you. For me, the real meaning of practicing mindfulness is to stop running away from yourself into fantasy, and instead choose to live in yourself and your world.

Being self-centered means:

Listen to your breath

Listen to the leaves rustling in the breeze

Listen to the whispers of the voices around you

Select the presence of

Feel no pressure

Move with an unhurried heart

Choose your path with all your heart

I guess it's a little bit like mindfulness, and for some people, mindfulness meditation may help to achieve a real state.

But I think many people, maybe most people, can do just that with a live adjustment to their daily mindset, by stopping to take a deep breath and then being present and open for a minute. Think of it as a moment of meditation, not actual meditation.

Going back to my own story, I didn't just grow up in disguise. Growing and coming out is not an automatic process, but requires a person to take steps, even if they are not fully conscious.

Be curious

The center helped, but it came later. What I did to make a real difference in the beginning was to start a journal. Not a record of everyday events, but a notebook of thoughts and observations. In doing so, I filled in the texture of my world and found my voice. Public speaking also helps in this area.

In addition, I began to investigate my cultural environment, especially music (mainly classical music, but also later world music), films and books. In doing so, I developed my own tastes and a higher degree of emotional maturity.

It's hard work. Some of this is introspective, of course: I look at myself and my feelings and patterns. And it's not just from my abstract mountaintop that I look down on other people, either: whenever I think I see someone doing some variation of pretend, I ask myself if I've done the same.

Leave word

A lot of growing up certainly involves looking inward, but in my case, equally much of growing up involves going out into the world and seeing what's out there, so I don't feel the need to make up a fake style to fill in the blanks.

Put inward-looking and outward-looking together, and you get my idea of authenticity.

Anyway, purple has never been my favorite color.