Sunday, December 30, 2007
Authenticity is everything
Be who you say you are. Do what you say you'll do. Don't waste peoples' time with bullshit, half-truths, or misinformation and they will respect you for it. Ascend high enough on the socioeconomic ladder, and they will hail you for it. Authenticity, as a byproduct of the soup created when one mixes integrity, courage, and will, provides a great internal strength. Why then do so many people seem so inauthentic? They must lack integrity, courage, and/or will.
No one likes it when their authenticity is brought to question. Amidst everything else that is happening at the office, I am now the subject of doubts by a select few coworkers. Some of this doubt is the result of a genuine misunderstanding, some of it is a byproduct of someone else's version of events(which is apparently inconsistent with mine), and the rest is a product of socially conditioned assumptions and the hazards of assuming. Without even realizing it, I have become the subject of office gossip and without having so much as kissed a coworker, ever, at any job I have ever had, find myself being looked upon as if I am covertly subverting females I work with.
Honestly, this sort of thing is the least of my problems, but it speaks to some fundamental truths that seem to pervade human social groups, or at least all the social groups I have ever been a part of. No matter how hard you work, no matter how honest you are, and no matter how genuinely you live, there will always be people assuming the worst. There will always people feeding the rumor mill and there will always be those ready to gossip. It is to be expected, so I shrug it off, most of the time anyway.
What is really bothering me is the question of what one has to do in order to quiet the doubters once and for all. How do you shut that valve definitively? I find myself wishing that technology allowed for hovering, digital, video recording devices, so that I could have inarguable proof of how I live my life. My life may be boring, it may even be pathetic by some peoples' standards, but if nothing else, it is what I claim it to be. I think that is more than a lot of people, particularly those doing all of this talking, can say about their own lives.
People are incredibly tedious and tiresome animals. I need to get myself a dog...
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