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The cult of authenticity is a form of moral hygiene. It punishes contradiction, demands transparency, and disguises itself as empowerment. But what if “you do you, girl” and no one likes you? What if you discover at your absolute core isn’t “all your unique gifts, skills, abilities, interests, talents, insights, and wisdom” but a rotting black mould that is boring, cruel, incoherent, and untalented? The demand for authenticity isn’t actually about truth, it is about discovering the safest and most sterile version of yourself.
The so-called “authentic self” is not a source—it’s a symptom of a society that is desperate for anchors in a sea of instability. But it’s precisely in instability—those liminal, unformed zones—that subjectivity emerges as something dynamic, speculative, and even dangerous. To insist on a “true self” is to enforce a self-containment. It is to foreclose becoming in favour of coherence. It is the logic of the border, not the threshold. 1 reply
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