How To Be Faithful To Yourself

A note from Caitlin of Dose of Wonder: This week’s guest post on authenticity comes from Rebecca of Life Unscripted, whose Substack is about: Musings and how-to's for shedding scripts and embracing your authenticity. So without further ado, let’s get into her article!

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Authenticity is becoming a buzz word, but what does it really mean?

To be authentic is to be true to your core values and to align your actions with your beliefs. Brené Brown, who could be credited with the increasing popularity of this concept wrote, “Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” But, amidst so many social scripts and external expectations, how do we even know who we are? How do we decipher when we’re acting according to what we think we should do versus what actually feels right to us?

Maybe we knew ourselves best when we were young, before we succumbed to the pressures of the world around us. As a child, I was deeply in touch with my emotions. I loved to feel deeply and even enjoyed a good cry. (My mother once gave me a beautifully illustrated copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl inscribed, “To Rebecca, who always loved a sad story.”) My imagination ran wild, and I loved spending time alone in the backyard singing and acting out scenes from books and musicals. As the eldest child, I had six years on my own before my sister came along, and I felt very comfortable with myself.

Then came the second half of elementary school, followed by middle school, high school, and college, where my focus was on academic achievement and friendships. Then came my 20’s, and with young adulthood I focused on the goal of achieving the life I wanted. I discovered bit by bit what I loved and followed the loose threads to see where they led. However, not until my 40’s did I realize the extent to which the person I had become depended on who I thought I should be and with whom I surrounded myself.

One beautiful thing about aging is that you have the chance to get to know yourself over the years. The proverbial midlife crisis can be an awakening if, instead of fearing future decline in old age, we appreciate the present freedom of no longer needing to fit in. Within this freedom, we can find ample space for authenticity to emerge.

Being true to oneself entails accepting strengths and weaknesses and trusting your inner voice. To hear it, you must first quiet the noise. As Glennon Doyle wrote in Untamed, “Be still and know.”

How do we get still enough to know what our intuition is telling us? The field of somatics teaches us that our body holds wisdom that the brain has not yet processed. There’s a reason it’s called a “gut” instinct. Often, when we give ourselves the space to breathe deeply and focus our attention inward, focusing on the feelings inside our bodies rather

than the thoughts in our heads, we can sit with a feeling or an idea and the body will guide us.

For example, bring to mind the idea of jumping into a deep body of water, plunging rapidly downward. As you imagine this, how does your body feel? You may feel a fluttering in your chest or butterflies in your stomach if the idea excites you. You may feel tension in your shoulders or your jaw or a weight on your chest if the idea scares you. You may feel yourself smiling or relaxing into the sinking feeling if the idea brings you joy.

Now, bring to mind biting into a hot blueberry muffin fresh out of the oven. You may feel your mouth start to salivate. Your eyes might close as your senses of smell, taste, or touch heightens with the idea, you may even swear you can taste the hot bursting blueberries. Perhaps you feel a softness in your body. Or, you could feel an uneasiness if you have a gluten intolerance that would make the muffin less enticing, or you may even feel your mouth pucker if you dislike blueberries.

The more we can tune into our body’s messages, the easier it is to live in authenticity. Our body will tell us very clearly if something goes against our core values. Try repeating the word “no” to yourself and sense how your body feels it. Then repeat the word “yes” and see how that feels. Finally, tell yourself, “maybe” and notice how that lands. Tuning into ourselves and expressing our truth is a powerful way of aligning our actions with our values. Although it can be hard to speak up when you’ve spent a lifetime suppressing yourself, everything gets easier with practice, and the more we practice listening to our instincts, the more at peace we will feel.

Here’s to an authentic and aligned 2025!

Thanks so much to Rebecca for sharing her musings on authenticity with everyone who subscribes to Dose of Wonder! Anyone else now craving blueberry muffins?!

Please go check out/follow/subscribe to Rebecca’s Substack through the button at the bottom of this article (or here if you’re on the app).