Authenticity Is Complicated

forgiveness for the fractured

Last year, I had the displeasure of indecision around whether or not to delete my LinkedIn account. I ended up deleting it. And recently, in true Libran fashion, I’ve been wondering if I need to recreate it. This has been a repulsive experience for me. I’ve tried to stay as detached from my wage labor as possible, and unfortunately, it’s not very possible. This thing that takes up the vast majority of my waking hours, including those delightful snatches of time after waking in the middle of night, is inescapable. I don’t identify with the professional managerial class, yet I am a part of it. I don’t identify with my professional role, yet I show up to perform it five days a week, morning til evening. It’s amazing what coercion can do! Despite my compliance, internally I am always resisting. My identity as an artist has always felt unsurprisingly in conflict with this person who is a worker under capitalism, and this inner conflict has been exhausting.

I have long lamented a feeling of being fractured, that I am unable to show up as my “full self” everywhere all the time but especially at work. Why do I feel the pressure to show up as my full self at work? Part of it is my particular field attempts to disrupt oppressive systems by encouraging people to show up with their full complexity and humanity. It’s a noble effort, and I support it, but unfortunately the constraints and oppressive forces of capitalism are never part of the conversation. And that’s where part of the pressure comes from too – capitalism tries to condense a complex human being into a marketable object, and I feel that all the time. I am fractured. We all are. But I may have found a way to cope with this pain that might invite a little more joy and play back into my life.

I gave myself the name Chiron Tide in 2016 to allow more freedom for my creative self, to create some distance between my creative outlets and my birth name, which would be how I was known in the professional world I was newly navigating. Those intentions were mostly subconscious back then – I had long been coming up with user names like all of us who’ve grown up on the internet. And as an artist, it feels natural to play with personas. What I realized is that my professional self is just another persona, and it’s one I don’t have to take so seriously. Yes, it’s the part of me constrained and coerced by capitalism, but it’s also the part of me who is an advocate for justice, the part of me who is driven by hope for a more radical future. It’s a part of me who can navigate the current systems with grace and a grain of salt, recognizing their rot and doing what she needs to do to survive while always striving for something different, something better. Why have I allowed her to be so maligned by the part of me who is an artist? Why has Chiron Tide always pushed away at this part of myself?

Resentment and bitterness are familiar feelings in capitalism. I have belittled and squashed parts of myself, and I have felt those experiences sometimes very viscerally as they happened. Part of why I can’t show up to work as my “full self” is because it’s just too painful. It’s too painful because the parts of myself that are creative don’t get the time that they need and deserve. They are marginalized, and they know it. Those parts of me are frustrated and sad. They feel betrayed by what I’ve done to survive capitalism. The advocate, the navigator, she took the lead, and it meant the dreamer, the artist was pushed to the margins, forced to live with crumbs of time and energy. Of course she resented the person who did that to her. Of course I’ve resented myself. I realized I still have a long way to go toward acknowledging that pain in myself, and allowing myself to grieve, and along the way, I think those parts of myself need to forgive the parts of me that made those difficult choices to try and move forward through a challenging situation. The part of me who took this well-tread, traditional path of higher education and a 9-5 did that to take care of all of me. She’d observed the previous 10 years of the creative trying to make it work, and I think she saw that my creative self was not and never would be in partnership with any kind of hustler or schemer. She was with a lil dreamer, and she was deep in her feelings and easily overwhelmed. She needed protection, and I’ve come to believe the advocate did a lot to protect her.

I love to think about all of this in terms of my birth chart. The dreamy artist is my Pisces Moon in the 5th House, and I have this wild adventurer with a stellium in Sagittarius, but I also have a Libra stellium in the 12th House, and this is the part of me who was an activist before I went back to school, who was advocating so passionately for what I cared about. And that’s the part of me who decided to major in women’s and gender studies, and who decided to go to grad school for social work. I think it’s important to acknowledge the intelligence of that part of me, who was able to allow space for all the feelings that come with being someone who does have such an adventurous, artistic spirit, and is unable to capitalize on any of that, while still moving forward with care and integrity through some very toxic places.

An element of this that’s hard to live with too is knowing that there are ways outside of the oppressive systems exist where I could live a more fully integrated life. It’s hard to have so many different interests and a dynamic personality in a place so polarizing and static! Part of me wants to be in the spotlight, performing, and part of me wants to live in a cave contemplating, and it’s like I have to pick and choose constantly along this path of making sure that I’m making money so that I can survive. So this is where I feel like I can have some influence on my own experience with the magic of language. Instead of lamenting the fracturing of my selves, instead of getting stuck in some painful separation, I can think of the parts of myself as all working together in a structured environment with helpful boundaries, playing their roles when it’s their turn, helping the whole of me survive.

a snippet of self from one of my collage books

“A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it. But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can’t know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.” -Oscar Wilde

I know one of capitalism’s best tricks is alienation, and it’s wild to finally be coming to terms with how I have alienated myself and the ways in which that has served capitalism and harmed me. My mistake has been believing that attaching my name to my vocation is a way of distilling myself, when it is just a game I have to play. I have been fooled by systems that don’t allow for complexity and nuance, and they have projected so much distress upon me. But my LinkedIn avatar is just that – an avatar, a version of me who is really just a part of me, and I applaud her. Let my little professional avatar shine out in the nightmare world! She’s a monster! I can lessen my suffering by forgiving and embracing all parts of myself. Forgive and embrace the creative who could not capitalize. Forgive and embrace the advocate who could. And above all, stay open to the idea that there are still so many parts of myself I have yet to know well and parts I have yet to meet at all. There is so much mystery even within the tiny universe of my experience, so much romantic chaos yet to be sewn, so much more wonder and wisdom to collect on my little dandelion seed journey.