Authenticity

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

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

— Albert Camus

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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“I think one of the marks of maturity […] - is the willingness to be seen exactly as I am. As we grow more settled and mature, we become less hidden to others, more transparent to ourselves as well as to each other. With this growing authenticity comes a deepening of intimacy with each... See more

Swept up in the Instagramization of the 2010s, the contemporary poetry world saw an exaltation of ‘honesty’ as an aesthetic priority. Poetry not as craft, but as ‘outlet,’ with the goal not of developing ourselves and enriching our understanding of the world, but of sitting more comfortably with how we already were and what we already believed.

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