Authenticity has a price
And it's your whole existence.
That's it. The delicate balance of this world rests on this one gambit. I don't mean your life, no. That would be too small a price, and frankly a damn shame. I do not intend to place a cost on your life. I do not intend to measure all your musical evenings and sunny walks against the extractive goal of being somebody. You already are somebody.
Take this assurance and remember that what you consider your life is much more expansive and grander than these boxes that have come to define who you are. A box for the dreamer. A box for the one who forsakes his dreams. A box for the socialite. A box for the one who avoids boxes - there is no escape. The boxes will keep spawning, each one with a label proclaiming "This is what this person is worth".
Fuck that.
Your existence > Your life.
When you're sleeping, twitching like an automation at the end of its instruction set, dreaming of blue and pink sheep leaping over giant cheesecakes and dumpling-shaped mountains, you're existing outside the box. Walking down the road, alone among wildflowers and lazy buffaloes caked with the sun and grey mud, you're outside the box. In fact, outside all your interactions with living and non-living inhabitants of this world is an entirely unexplored ocean of your existence.
And we live out our hand-me-down lives never even smelling this ocean. It's alive inside and outside you, bubbling, frothing, churning itself into each piece of your thought and action. That sudden burst of anger at the bus-stop? That is you. That daydream about a quiet life in Mallorca? You, again. All your subconscious and conscious selves are receivers of your wider-self. Jung calls it the shadow. You may call it the you that never got to live.
To live out your years in society is to be bound into labelled boxes. Disregarding monkhood or absolute detachment, you can indeed be authentic AND live out an ordinary life. These labels of rich, smart, poor, dumb and so on are for the boxes. Your social interactions are labelled by those who seek to keep you inside your box. Your existence is beyond labels and boxes, in those quiet after-hours when nobody's listening in and you still play the music.
Purely for love of the game. That is authenticity.
And it will take everything you seemingly own, even that which you feel you don't. It will take your car, your clothes, your fancy vacation and your relationships. And it will also take your long, solitary walks in the dusk. That sliver of sunshine on a field of wildflowers. That sudden burst of inspiration in the middle of a bad bout of diarrhea. Those silent nights with nothing but the wind in your hair and the city thrumming underneath, when a cigarette would burn out like a dying star 50 million light years into the fathomless depths above.
All of your known and unknown images. All your mirrors. All your silence, and your music.
It will take all of it before you feel that sudden drop inside your chest. Before you feel the butterfly shred its chrysalis and emerge into the sunshine. It will take everything and more, and you'll lose everything and more.
And yet, when you're through, you'll find out it was all remarkably easy. Because all these boxes, never had a receiver's address.
You caught all of them, made them your home. You had nothing.
You had everything. The sunshine, the rain on the grass, the sound of wild hooves in the undergrowth, the smell of an evening dissolving into an ancient swampland. You had all these, and more.
And it took this, just this, to live an authentic life. Far from price tags and valuations, far from the urge to be somebody, far from the desire to live, and not exist.
I am inauthentic as I write this, because these words are not mine. I shall stop now, and I hope you do too.