Waiting for your REAL life to begin?
Who are the real psychologists?
Who is the real mother?
Who, or what, is your real self?
Is this my real life, or hasn't it started yet?
Reading the discussion in some of the Psychology Today blogs about who is doing ‘real' psychology - as well as the larger national conversation this and other similar debates take place in - reminds me of all the ways we assign roles of who is real and who isn't, and how deeply attached we all are to the idea of essential realness.
Adopted kids get asked all the time, "Who is your real mom?"
We minimize things by demoting them to a state of less than full realness: "It's not a real job/relationship/title/degree/ idea..."
We hurl unreality at people as the most pointed insult: Get a real life! Get a real job! And we whisper it to ourselves, as our deepest worry, waiting for our real life to begin. The test of when that realness has finally arrived seems elusive; does real life begin when you move out? Get engaged? First job? Best job? Marriage/life partnership? Kids? Once you've had more than one kid? Once you get rolling on that second career you've always dreamed of? Get sober? Write the book? Stand up to your parents? Lose the weight? Get that feeling that you think you're supposed to have when you are living your real life.
We are surrounded by the demand for the real whatever to stand up and be counted. We have passionate self narratives about waiting, oh Lord, waiting in the line behind Godot, for our real lives to finally begin.
It's not just the field of psychology that suffers through identity crisis cycles. I mean, who IS doing real science these days? Who are the real writers? My New Media students blog about who are the real journalists. But if it's blogging, is it real writing? Who are the real representatives of our generation/religion/self-defined group?
All of this reaching for reality got me thinking about the realness impulse, and how much I engage in it every single day. I am desperate for the thing that feels like being in the club, the real deal, the Truth, the ‘Yup, this is real, baby.' What is that, exactly, that thing where you're so deeply who you are? Authenticity? True selfhood? Empathy - given and received simultaneously?
At the core, it feels like this:
I'm being who I am, not who I think they want me to be or who I think I'm expected to be. I am saying what I think. I am responding honestly and being fully present. I feel genuine. My feelings feel genuine. As we talk, as I teach, as I listen, as I write, as we are together in whatever way, it is genuine. It is an electrical charge connecting us. Is it empathy? Is it simply being understood, heard and known? What is it made of? I don't know. But I know when it begins and can feel precisely when it breaks and disconnects. It feels like the only thing that is real.
It's like I turned 40 and flipped a switch. Maybe I just flipped. I must be my real self. Come what may, I yearn every day for that perfect-pitch feeling of being my whole, true self in precisely the same moment as I am speaking. Or writing. Being real in real time. Not later. Not only in my head, but from my brain, through my heart, out into the world.
I know I am not alone in saying I used to perform much of my life, wrapped in this gauzy notion of external expectations, and internal mush. Those moments of being real with those closest to me, felt like rare, precious treasures, like quick snatches of oxygen before you hold it all in and dive back down again. Because I'm the Mom, and because I want to be genuinely intimate with those I love, and genuinely present for those I teach, and genuine for those to whom I write, I will not break that connection anymore. I feel the artifice accutely now, like the screech-scratching of nails on a chalkboard.
This very personal take on our national fixation on being real is not about shooting one's mouth off. It's not the same thing as having no filter, which I somehow totally do and don't simultaneously. I do, in the form of a Cruella DeVille manicky internal critic; and I totally don't because I have, on occasion, left meetings where I perceive that my comments simply shed light on a relevant topic, while my colleagues have perceived that their hair has been seared off.
I now have a Seussian need to say what I mean and mean what I say. What is it about claiming authenticity? How and why did it become the Holy Grail? Why do certain feelings (mostly the bad ones) feel like the "real" feelings and the other ones ring hollow, like the ones where the world probably isn't ending.
Are they related? Our national need to drink the real Coke, to establish who are the real members of our field/religion/gender/social strata/book group. We all belong to these secret societies where we've paid some steep price or earned our way in. Somehow the price of admission requires that somebody else - by definition-must be kept out. If I am the real one, somebody must be a fake.
She's not a real infertile...she already has one kid!
In fact, their very fakeness makes my realness shine all the brighter.
There's a rule here in Oregon. If someone asks you if you're an Oregonian, unless you are fourth generation born and raised, you say no. You are simply not a real Oregonian. They're polite about it. Polite, but firm.
Of course, I'm a Chicagoan. A real Chicagoan; which you'd already know if you were a real one, too.
By Pamela Cytrynbaum, Follow-me on twitter (pamcytrynbaum)
© 2009
All rights reserved. Reprinted only with written permission by author.
