Being Oneself
Authenticity has become one of those words that arrives in conversation already exhausted. It appears in corporate mission statements and therapy waiting rooms and the captions of photographs taken to look unstaged, and in each of these contexts it carries the same implication: that there is a real self underneath whatever is currently on display, and that the distance between the two constitutes a problem requiring correction.
Be authentic. Be yourself.
The instruction seems straightforward until you ask what being yourself actually means, and then it becomes considerably less clear. Oneself in relation to what? Compared to whom? The self that existed before other people began shaping it, or the self that emerged from that shaping and is now indistinguishable from it? I find the word useful in conversation and nearly useless as a category, because every time I try to define it precisely I find it contains the same circularities as the conversations it appears in.
Solitude has a similar problem, though its distortion runs in a different direction. The current literature on the subject—and there is a great deal of it, produced by researchers who study populations rather than individuals—tends to conflate solitude with loneliness, which treats them as points on the same spectrum rather than as genuinely different states.
Loneliness is the condition of wanting connection and not having it. Solitude is the condition of being alone in a way that doesn’t generate that want, or that generates something else instead—space, quiet, the particular quality of self-knowledge that only arrives when there is no one else in the room.
The research that identifies solitude as a health risk is working with population data, which is well-suited to identifying average conditions and poorly suited to describing the individual who doesn’t match the average. I notice that the men who came to see me, and who might have appeared from the outside to be living disconnected lives, were not always, or even often, suffering from what the literature would call loneliness. They were something else, which the available vocabulary didn’t have a precise word for.
The word disconnected is another one I find more disabling than descriptive. It positions a person in relation to a network—implies that connection is the default state and departure from it is a fault in the system, like a phone that has lost its signal.
The metaphor carries values inside it. To be disconnected is to be malfunctioning. I found, in practice, that the men who used that word about themselves were using it because it was the word available, not necessarily because it accurately named their experience. What they were describing was more specific: the absence of a particular kind of connection, with a particular kind of person, on a particular kind of subject. They were not isolated from the world. They were isolated from the conversation they needed to have within it.
I want to be precise about what that conversation was, because the precision matters. It was not always, or even primarily, about sex. The men who visited me and who were in the process of exploring something new about their own desires—who had reached an age at which the settled version of themselves had begun to feel incomplete—were not only looking for a sexual experience. They were looking for somewhere to be known.
The word intimacy turns out to mean this, when you follow it back past its contemporary associations: a state in which what is most internal is also most visible, in which there is no gap between what you are and what you present. That state does not require sex to exist, though sex can produce it. What it requires is another person who is willing to receive what is offered without immediately sorting it into something they can manage.
I noticed, in the men who arrived in this state of partial emergence, a particular combination of qualities that I found genuinely difficult to name as loneliness. They were often highly functioning in the areas of their lives that had defined them for decades. They had marriages and friendships and professional lives and community involvements.
The disconnection was not global—it was targeted, specific, limited to the part of themselves that had no place in the existing structure of their lives. And that part, unhoused and unspoken, had been growing heavier over years. Not because they had no one around them but because the people around them were precisely the people for whom this particular self had to remain invisible.
The question of acceptance sits inside all of this in a way that the current cultural narrative about sexual difference doesn’t fully account for. I found that the broader social acceptance that has developed over recent decades—the general liberalisation of attitudes toward different forms of intimacy and desire—had not always translated into the specific social worlds these men actually inhabited.
Their community, their family, the people at the table on a Sunday evening—these were not the general population. They were a particular set of relationships with a particular history, and within that history a man who had always been one thing now found himself uncertain that he was only that thing, and the uncertainty was not speakable in the room where he spent his life.
So he drove to a studio in the mountains, or flew from another country, and sat across from a person who would receive what he brought without adding it to any structure that would follow him home.
I have been thinking for some time about what is actually underneath the word authenticity when it appears in the context I am describing—not the pop-psychology usage, not the corporate branding usage, but the lived, private, slightly desperate usage of a man in his fifties or sixties who is no longer certain that the self he has been presenting to the world is the complete version.
I don’t think what he is looking for is a truer self that has always been waiting beneath the presented one. I think what he is looking for is permission—not formal permission, not permission from any authority, but the practical permission that comes from being in the company of someone who already knows that the territory he is approaching exists and doesn’t find it alarming.
The expectations that accumulate around a man over fifty are substantial and largely invisible to him, because they have been accumulating for so long that he stopped being able to see them as expectations and started experiencing them as simply the shape of his life. He is what he is, as defined by decades of being that in front of other people.
The exploration that arrives in his fifties or later—the curiosity about what might have been different, or what might still be different, or what the unlabelled part of him would look like if he gave it any room—is not a crisis in the clinical sense. It is something more like a question that has been forming in the background for years and has finally reached the volume at which it can no longer be treated as background noise.
I found that what helped was not the provision of an answer. It was the provision of a space in which the question was allowed to exist without requiring a conclusion. A man who has spent years not asking a question has usually also spent years assuming that the question itself is the problem—that if he could stop the question from forming, the problem would go away. What he discovers, when the question is finally allowed into the room, is that the question was not the problem. I noticed that once the question was allowed into the room, it often stopped feeling like an external problem and began to seem part of the man himself. And him being present in a room with the question, attended to by someone who has no investment in how he answers it, turns out to be different from what he expected.
What it turns out to be is difficult to say without resolving it into something tidier than it was. Men who had arrived carrying something they described as loneliness often left not having lost the feeling but having found it located differently. It was still there. But it was no longer evidence of a deficiency. It was a description of the specific thing that was absent—not connection in the general sense, but this particular kind, with this particular quality, on these particular terms. Named that precisely, it became something other than a verdict on the life they had been living.
Whether naming it changed anything beyond the session I cannot say. In most cases I never found out. A man came. We spent time in whatever way the time wanted to be spent. He drove back down the mountain and I went on with the afternoon.
The weight of expectations doesn’t lift in an hour. The question of who a man is, underneath everything he has spent decades being, doesn’t resolve in a session. What I could offer was small and specific: an afternoon in which nothing was required of him except to show up as whatever he was at that moment. Whether what he was at that moment was authentic in any useful sense of the word, I genuinely don’t know. It felt, from where I was sitting, like a man in a room, allowing himself to be in it.
You are here: Manly Views