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I am big on authenticity. Part of that is just me hating the moments in my career when I was forced to be something other than myself because it was difficult, or felt uncomfortable. I used to feel so boxed in all the time, this perfect little suit-wearing representative of the nonprofit that is worth donors’ money. I would hesitate to let my guard down in case one of my IMPORTANT RICH BOARD MEMBERS™ might be around.
But I also believe being authentic is the right thing to do – no one wants to live in a world where the one thing they can trust others to do is put on a false front because it’s WORK. Like work is this thing that you need to stop being yourself to do. On the contrary, I think your work will be at its best when you are true to yourself, your personality, your patterns, and the way you build your environment to create success for yourself.
So I try to blog authentically too. I almost did this blog anonymously, practically salivating over the potential opportunity to write about former asshole bosses and clueless foundations with as much snark and scathitude (I made it up, deal with it) as I wanted. But then I realized that wouldn’t help me connect with anyone. And after all, why I am I writing, if not to reach out and connect with other nonprofit workers and leaders slogging it out in the trenches/cubicles?
But the perils of putting your true self out there are many. I woke up this morning, opened up my Google Reader and followed a link to a shitstorm over at Penelope Trunk’s blog, Brazen Careerist.
Penelope (or Adrienne) is my inspiration when it comes to being authentic in my work and in my writing. I’ve written before how she’s been the cause of certain realizations of mine and how I think we’re very similar. She’s been a champion of letting go of the walls we build between us in the workplace, and of honesty and realism in work and relationships. I love her Twitter feed and Facebook updates and all the embarrassing minutiae she posts that most people would try to keep from others. She is a wildly successful person who lets it all hang out, for good and for bad, and I have the urge to do that in the worst way.
You can read the post and the comments and make your own judgment. I think she overreacted to @DavidDellifield’s comment about her kids, but I also know I would have done something similar, if not an exact reproduction of her response. It reminds me of the time I came home from spending the holidays with my parents to a handwritten proselytizing note in the mail from someone in a local evangelist Christian group and I went on a giant tear where I was going to write an anonymous note back to them and make them feel shitty for pushing their religion on me and invading my space. I had to be talked down from the ledge on that one, mostly by people on an internet community for Boston, where I used to live. Yikes.
Anyway, some people in the comments support Penelope, and some of them rip her to shreds and say they’re never going to read her blog again. They would be doing themselves a disservice, I think. Because she is just being herself. She doesn’t pretend that she is perfect, that life is perfect, that all children are angels who can do no wrong, or that your actual skills and competence in the workplace are more important than whether or not people like you. Penelope lives and writes in the real world, where people have difficult choices to make, way too much going on to always be able to prioritize well, or JUST CAN’T FUCKING DEAL RIGHT NOW for whatever reason. The people who are shitting themselves in the comments and unsubscribing must be perfect themselves, as they only seem to want to read posts or advice from a perfect person.
I posit that it doesn’t do us any good to live in “the should.” We live in “the what is,” not “the should,” and no one is perfect. That’s why I left fuck in the sentence in the last paragraph. In caps. Because, in real life, I swear. A lot. And swearing is fun, and it’s almost as fun to write fuck as it is to say it.
I wish I could email my past self Penelope’s current blog entry and frame it with a note to her. “Look at this,” it would say. “You don’t have to be a perfect little tabula rasa at work all the time, editing out all the best parts of yourself. Successful people don’t try to whittle away their personality or work around it. They find a way to harness it and be themselves. Do that and you’ll be golden.” I think I could have saved myself a lot of trouble then.
But I still have a lot to learn. I’m not perfect, and I’d rather seek sources of encouragement and wisdom from people who don’t operate under the assumption that we all are or even should be. I’d rather learn from someone like Penelope. Her imperfection is my inspiration.