How to Be Your Authentic Self — On Remembering the Unedited You

You find the video by accident while clearing the dust-soft corners of your childhood room. A seventh-birthday home movie: you in a makeshift superhero cape—really a beach towel, safety pins flashing like tiny medals. The camera wobbles as you demonstrate a dance that, you explain, “makes sad people happy and scared people brave.” Somewhere inside you, a long-quiet question leans forward: how to be your authentic self—what if this child already knew?

You perform without calculation—arms flinging, breathless spinning, a bow to the stuffed-animal parliament. The little person on the screen shares your face but not your hesitations, and something unlatched inside your chest sighs with relief. If anyone needed a syllabus for how to be your authentic self, this scene would be the opening chapter: move like the song is inside you even when the room is silent.

When did silence become proof that dancing was embarrassing? When did speaking plainly about feelings become a social hazard? When did you learn to apologize for occupying air, for carrying opinions, for burning with the unedited brightness of someone who hasn’t yet learned to dim?

Your mother wanders into the frame, laughing when you trip and pop back up, undeterred. “Tell them about your invention,” she prompts from behind the lens. You beam and explain the machine you’ll build—vegetables in, candy out, vitamins intact. Then the line that once felt like oxygen: “Impossible is just a word grown-ups use when they forget how to imagine.” No module on how to be your authentic self ever sounded clearer: name the spell, refuse to bow to it.

Twenty-three years later, an office badge hangs where the towel-cape used to be. You’ve mastered the preface that keeps you safe—“This might be stupid, but…”—and the preemptive laugh that lands before anyone else can fire. Presence without footprint. A choreography of shrinking. The child on the screen would be heartbroken at your résumé of careful disappearances.

You remember the first lesson in smallness. Third grade. Mrs. Kim asks what you want to be. You lift your hand and say it all in one breath—“inventor-veterinarian-artist-astronaut”—because why ration wonder? The class giggles. Mrs. Kim smiles the soft smile teachers use when they’re about to fold a map. “That’s wonderful creativity,” she says, “but maybe pick one. We have to be realistic.” A bright organ inside you doesn’t die; it just learns to fold itself tighter, to fit the desk.

After that, sediment: Sit still. Color inside the lines. Don’t ask so many questions. Nice girls don’t interrupt. Boys don’t cry. Smart kids don’t show off. Pretty and funny shouldn’t travel together. Pick a lane; swear an oath to it. No one explains how to be your authentic self in a culture that prizes tidy edges. They teach palatability, not presence.

Your teenage diary carries the evidence—dreams crossed out until they resemble receipts. You practiced a fluent dialect of self-editing: enthusiasm muted to survive, vulnerability treated as a leak to patch, visibility equated with danger. You learned the difference between being accepted and being known, and chose the former because it felt less expensive.

But the video offers an older truth. Here is someone who lived before the red pen. Someone who believed weirdness was a compass, sensitivity a superpower, big feelings a set of cathedral bells. This kid befriended the world by showing up loud and sincere. They cried at credits. They interviewed strangers in grocery lines. They drew self-portraits with wings and rainbow hair because why should the soul restrict itself to human tones or human anatomy?

They trusted that the ordinary world wore costumes over magic, and refused the script that said pretend otherwise.

Your best friend calls while the screen still glows. “Remember those stories about talking furniture?” she laughs. “You were so bizarre. It’s funny how normal you turned out.” Normal arrives like a small funeral bouquet. You realize you have practiced normal the way others practice scales.

Twilight gathers in your childhood room. The tape ends; you’re left with evidence of who you were before the syllabus of shame. The person in the video would not recognize the careful version you’ve become, though you feel them stirring whenever you think no one’s looking—when you sing off-key in traffic, chat with plants, gasp at cloud architectures, or study the way morning light gilds your coffee rim. These are the unguarded rehearsals for how to be your authentic self—the moments when you forget to perform and remember to be.

The tragedy isn’t that the world changed you; it’s that you accepted the edited draft as the final manuscript. You mistook adaptation for annihilation, adulthood for the art of becoming smaller. Perhaps the real curriculum is simpler and more dangerous: not learning who you’re supposed to be, but recalling who you were before shame offered you a narrower name. Perhaps wisdom is not capitulation to limits but a muscle memory—why you once believed “impossible” was just a word for imagination amnesia.

You rewind to the frame where you bow, gap-toothed and radiant, beach towel cinched like a flag of allegiance. “When I grow up,” you promise the future, “I’ll remember everything about being a kid, so I don’t forget how to be magic.” It occurs to you that this, too, is instruction—an answer tucked into a wish. If you still want directions for how to be your authentic self, begin by keeping that promise. Let the untrained parts of you stretch. Let delight interrupt you. Let the voice that never learned to whisper try again at full volume.

Later, in the quiet, you realize the lesson was never a checklist. It is a sequence of permissions: to take up the room your life requires, to tell the truth without apologizing for its brightness, to befriend your strangeness until it introduces you to belonging. It is a willingness to meet the world without a practiced flinch. It is the ordinary holy of moving like you did in that shaky footage—as if the music is inside you and the point is not to impress but to answer it.

You close the laptop. The room is dark, but you don’t reach for the light right away. You stand there, feeling the cape that isn’t there and the steadiness that is. The question that has shadowed you for years—how to be your authentic self—no longer sounds like an exam. It sounds like a memory returning to its body. You inhale. You step forward. And without waiting for permission, you begin to dance to the silence again.