Authenticity

Confessional art can be beautiful, and it can be terrible; either way, to love it only as a representation of what we already know is to deny it, and ourselves, a much richer complexity. Pop music is where fantasies are played out, turned into mansions and lived in, where five hundred people can tumble out of a clown car and every dream comes true.

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On the other side of creative aliveness, there is flatness. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, about what happens when our worlds go flat. The dynamism we lose, the emotional urges we suppress, the original impulses we become too afraid to nurture.

On the running path recently, a song came on. It was by Eminem. His music is not my choice for... See more

instead of asking: how can i be more like them? ask: how can i be more like me? how many versions of me do i occupy? where do they live? how do they grow? what will they bloom into? what rituals do they practice? how do they... See more

What I want to say most is that I am not an improved or better version of myself than I was a year ago because that is no longer a goal — but I am a truer version, a closer-in version, a more expansive and open version, a less clinging-to-certainty version, and that, to me, counts for a lot more than seeking to endlessly upgrade myself.

Donald Glover in an interview with The New Yorker: “Authenticity is the journey of figuring out who you are through what you make.”