'Be true to yourself' and other exhortations




Social media is awash with hashtags such as 'be true to yourself', 'embrace yourself', 'worthy of love' and so on.
You know when you get too much of a good thing, yes? Every time I check my Instagram or Facebook feed and see these words dancing before my eyes, I feel physically sick. How many more times do I have to read this? What exactly are people saying?
I resent being continuously told to be true to myself. Remember when you were little, and you were asked all the time whether you had brushed your teeth? I could not bear it, even though it was my mother who asked, lovingly - and she certainly meant well.
Those who are telling me to be true to myself are perfect strangers who belong to a very fake virtual community. The hashtag often appears under a carefully airbrushed picture of a woman engaged in some activity or even unabashedly endorsing a product.
There are days when I honestly do not know myself at all. Do you?
Our identities are complex, and they are not fixed in time. Who we are is also determined by our social and cultural context. So 'being true to oneself' turns into a mere platitude, there is no 'authentic self', it is a construct.
It is a point that is well made in issue eight of the online journal Vestoj, a publication that discusses fashion in a critical mode.  In a very thoughtful piece, the journal's editors discuss authenticity and the self, with reference to fashion, asking whether it is possible to be authentic in fashion. I was struck by the sentence "Only by overcoming the accepted norms imposed on us by our social institutions – family, education, religion, government – can an individual begin to live a truly authentic life". And dress accordingly.


Our 'being true to ourselves' often becomes, predictably,  jumping on the latest bandwagon, with little or no reflection. The constant exhortations to be authentic turn into empty words, just fashionable slogans.
So next time you come across that laudable exhortation, 'Be true to yourself', you may want to dig a little to find out what this self might actually be. It might surprise you to find that, just like when you peel an onion, you are actually left with nothing - your 'selves' are all there, in those layers you have peeled off.  To which one of these are you being true?





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