I still remember all the nights I spent praying, dreaming, and crying because I wanted to not feel like a stranger in my own body. I lived like that for 30 years…my heart and mind constantly at war with the reflection I saw every day in the mirror. Broken, depressed, and tired, I never imagined I’d ever live a happy life.

Until…

I finally made the decision to be true to myself.

Almost 10 years ago now, I transitioned and it is still surreal to look in a mirror or see a picture because I never truly believed I’d be this happy or feel like I’m at home in my own body.

I’ve been musing this week on two experiences I’ve had watching a couple of videos I’m about to screen in my next program. Both of them make me uncomfortable in different ways, and I’ve realized that the uncomfortable experience itself is actually what I like about each piece.

The first project doesn’t have a lot that happens during the course of the film and the other is weirdly intimate. Because the first one moves along so slowly, of course, I found my mind spinning out. Normally I’d describe this experience as being bored by the film, except that the contents of my thoughts were not any of the usual stuff. Instead I was debating with myself, trying to work out if what is being depicted is real or if it’s an actor or if that even matters at all. I’d already seen the piece before. I knew what happened at the end and I still continued to have this philosophical discussion with myself about authenticity and representation. I had experienced the same chain of thoughts the first time through the film, and I was almost pleased that the second viewing produced the same result.

The other project is clearly making use of the audience’s discomfort to make a point. The camera is too close, the subjects are behaving strangely, the sounds they’re making are unpleasant. Previewing the film, I stopped it, then fast forwarded, and finally skipped ahead to the end. Later, I still had to re-watch it, and even though I knew what was actually being depicted it didn’t help me feel less uncomfortable being so close to these strangers. Which is part of the point, you can’t ever be sure you understand why another person is behaving in a certain way, or what their motivation might be. And again, this same issue between what is real, what is acted and whether or not the differentiation makes any difference.

Both pieces are fairly short, and being uncomfortable or having your mind wander for a few minutes doesn’t seem like too much of a sacrifice. But I wonder if others will experience these two pieces and come away with the same positive reaction that I have—I wonder if they will see the value in being uncomfortable.

JLF ARCHITECTS

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:

being sexy literally has nothing to do with looks… you need to be a little bit weird and strange and unusual. people who are physically perfect by societal standards are not sexy like where’s the flavour. the body hair. i’m right

goldenwines:

There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

seravph:

i think it is very depressing that like every aesthetic people try to emulate are of people doing things but they themselves are incapable of being somebody that does things… the mall goth 2005 aesthetic revived in 2022 but nobody goes to the mall to be annoying and weird and nobody lets themselves be cringe… the cottagecore aesthetic but nobody knows how to raise gardens or live self sufficiently … the dark academia aesthetic but nobody actually reads books…. The obsession of looking like you are a type of person who does something without actually doing anything … the Instagram effect

People who unironically love things without embarrassment, who are their authentic selves no matter the backlash, are more punk or rebel than the aestheticians that devote their whole lives and wallets to a style. There’s a reason we have the term ‘try-hard’. 'Poser’ was not intended as a way of gatekeeping those are don’t look the part, it was to keep out people who wear subcultures like outfits without understanding the underlying philosophy. The WHY of it all. Often the most anti-establishment and anti-conformity people are also *really* cringey and genuinely weird.

Authenticity, living life being true to who you truly want to be. 

“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let out true selves be seen.” Brene Brown

“Authenticity starts in the heart.” 

Brian D’Angelo

“Authenticity over everything.” 

Anonymous

“If you’re your authentic self, you have no competition.” 

Anonymous

“Don’t trade your authenticity for approval.” 

Anonymous

“Honesty and authenticity are a big deal for me.” 

Scarlett Thomas

“Authenticity: The courage to be yourself.” 

Anonymous

“Be fearlessly authentic.” 

Anonymous

“Authenticity is magnetic.” 

Anonymous

“Authenticity is more important.” 

Anonymous

“Less perfection. More authenticity.” 

Anonymous

“Don’t talk about it, be about it.” 

Anonymous

“Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity.” 

Coco Chanel

“Authenticity requires a certain measure of vulnerability, transparency, and integrity.” 

Janet Louise Stephenson

“I’ve always loved the idea of not being what people expect me to be.” 

Dita Von Teese

“Authenticity is your most precious commodity as a leader.” 

Marcus Buckingham

“You attract the right things when you have a sense of who you are.” 

Amy Poehler

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” 

Friedrich Nietzsche

“To become conscious and aware, we must become authentic. Authenticity is the highest form of being.” 

Teal Swan

“We are constantly invited to be who we are.” 

Henry David Thoreau

“Living from a place of authenticity is difficult because those living in distortion see you as a threat to their delusion and some are so attached to that delusion that they will behave in erratic ways to defend their ego’s projection of wounding.” 

Suzanne Wagner

“Aspire to be authentic.” 

Yann Martel

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” 

E.E. Cummings

“When you are authentic, you create a certain energy, people want to be around you because you are unique.” 

Andie MacDowell

“Accept no one’s definition of your life, define yourself.” 

Anonymous

“Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.” 

Eckhart Tolle

“To become authentic we require a thirst for freedom.” 

Don Mateo Sol

“I choose to be authentic in everything I do.” 

India Arie

“Have the courage to be who you want to be, in a world that is trying to make you like everyone else.” 

ATGW

“Authenticity is about being true to who you are.” 

Michael Jordan

“As I began to love myself. I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living my own truth. Today I know this is authenticity.” 

Charlie Chaplin

“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found that attitude, follow it.” 

William James

“Uncover your true self.” 

Anonymous

” Authenticity is more than speaking; Authenticity is also about doing. Every decision we make says something about who we are.” 

Simon Sinek

“When you show up authentic, you create the space for others to do the same. Walk in your truth.”

Anonymous

“Stay true to your brand and true to your voice and audiences will respond to that authenticity with enthusiasm and passion.” 

Kevin Spacey

“The quality of your life is directly related to the authenticity of the dreams you choose to follow.” 

Anonymous

“Authenticity is at the heart of success.” 

Anonymous

“Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” 

Oscar Wilde

“Being sincere and true to yourself defines your authenticity.” 

Arsenio V Manalo Jr

“Own who you are.” 

Anonymous

“I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.” 

Oprah Winfrey

“We have to dare to be ourselves.” 

May Sarton

via 43 Inspirational Quotes On Being Authentic To Yourself By Asad Meah

I’ve fallen into the world of wristwatch enthusiasm and I’m pasting below (with a few edits) something that I wrote two weeks ago in a watch forum of sorts, some writing that I want to preserve here and that touches on frequent topics of this Tumblr like how we learn, wealth inequality, internet culture, etc. There will likely be additional watch content here in the near future.

William Gibson’s “My Obsession” from 1999 is something of a classic essay on eBay and collecting, and it’s specifically about his dive into watches. When I became interested in watches about a year ago, the product of research for a gift, I recalled reading Gibson’s piece (in print, no less!) when it was published and I looked it up. It’s a nice time machine to an earlier experience on the internet in addition to being a great story about watch enthusiasm. I’ll post two passages to bait you into reading the whole thing before moving on to some additional thoughts and a 2015 interview with Gibson about the essay.

Bait one:

But I didn’t really want to have to buy this very large watch. Which was in Uruguay. And now I was still high bidder, and the auction would be run off before I got back to Vancouver. I thought about having to resell the Zenith.

When I did get back, though, I discovered, to mixed emotions, that I’d been “sniped.” Someone, or rather their automated bidding software, had swooped in, in the last few seconds, and scooped the Zenith for only the least allowable increment over my bid.

Bait two:

Any Swatch or Casio keeps better time, and high-end contemporary Swiss watches are priced like small cars. But mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They’re pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they’re comforting precisely because they require tending.

And vintage mechanical watches are among the very finest fossils of the pre-digital age. Each one is a miniature world unto itself, a tiny functioning mechanism, a congeries of minute and mysterious moving parts. Moving parts! And consequently these watches are, in a sense, alive. They have heartbeats. They seem to respond, Tamagotchi-like, to “love,” in the form, usually, of the expensive ministrations of specialist technicians. Like ancient steam-tractors or Vincent motorcycles, they can be painstakingly restored from virtually any stage of ruin.

And, as with the rest of the contents of the world’s attic, most of the really good ones are already in someone’s collection.

But the best of what’s still available, below the spookily expensive level of a Sotheby’s watch auction, can still be had for a few thousand dollars at most. At the time of this writing, the most desirable vintage Rolex on one New York dealer’s Web site, a stainless steel “bubble back” automatic, is priced at $3,800, a fraction of the cost of many contemporary watches by the same maker. (And it’s so much cooler, possesses so much more virtu, than one of those gold-and-diamond Pimpomatic numbers!)

Yes, “they require tending.” See Cortázar(ororiginal Spanish). Also Pimpomatic! I guess we know what Gibson thinks about iced-out watches.

I hope you enjoy that essay as much as I do, and if you just read the essay and stop here, I will be happy to have shared that joy. But I am also posting about Gibson’s essay because I think it provides some insight into what is going on with Rolex (and to a great extent much of the watch world) right now and it helps expand on what I wrote in response (elsewhere) to a Jenni Elle video addressing accusations about Rolex collectors being “inauthentic”:

I enjoyed that video and agree with a lot within. I particularly like the insights about “cheating” and I’d love to see that point explored more because I think a lot of the resentment and subsequently the overuse (I’d say misuse, as Jenni implies) of the term authenticity is a reflection of the vast inequality in the world and the rapid acceleration of inequality through the pandemic. That goes for not only capital wealth, but also attention and status. Jenni used the word deserve (in air quotes) and I think that’s the big clue – people are sensing, as they do in many different ways, that society is rigged. It is. No one deserves to have vastly more than other people and no one deserves to have nothing. And all of this inequality has become more apparent in the watch world as new and wealthy watch collectors have arrived during the pandemic.

I love how in so many was the watch world reflects the wider world. I’ve only been an enthusiast for about a year now, and as I explain to people who are not, my watch explorations, readings, studies, what-have-you overlap with pretty much anything and everything. The watch world is like a caricature of the greater world in many ways.

Back to Gibson, here’s the part that relates to the Jenni Elle video and my repsonse:

an ongoing democratization of connoisseurship, in which curatorial privilege is available at every level of society

and

But the main driving force in the tidying of the world’s attic, the drying up of random, “innocent” sources of rarities, is information technology. We are mapping literally everything, from the human genome to Jaeger two-register chronographs, and our search engines grind increasingly fine.

More people have access to information that was once required a lot of effort to come by. Before this “map,” people who worked at acquiring that information, but had limited funds could still participate. It leveled the playing field to some extent. But now with the information so easily available, people with lots of funds have a nearly complete advantage. And that makes people resentful leading to those accusations of “lack of authenticity” that Jenni Elle talks about in her video.

And maybe I am less bothered than other watch fans in part because my interest in watches is more about learning than about accumulation. Again, Gibson brings some great insight here because his dive into watches was similar (although he did actually purchase some expensive watches, unlike me). In 2015, for WatchPaper, Michael Vinovich followed up with Gibson about his essay (another great read!), and Gibson said this:

People who’ve read this piece often assume that I subsequently became a collector of watches. I didn’t, at least not in my own view. Collections of things, and their collectors, have generally tended to give me the willies. I sometimes, usually only temporarily, accumulate things in some one category, but the real pursuit is in the learning curve. The dive into esoterica. The quest for expertise. This one lasted, in its purest form, for five or six years. None of the eBay purchases documented [in the essay] proved to be “keepers.” Not even close.

and

I actively enjoy having fewer, preferably better things. So I never deliberately accumulated watches, except as the temporary by-product of a learning curve, as I searched for my own understanding of watches, and for the ones I’d turn out to particularly like. I wanted an education, rather than a collection. But there’s always a residuum: the keepers. (And editing is as satisfying as acquiring, for me.”

“The real pursuit is in the learning curve.” Yup, that’s me. All of this is also further evidence of why William Gibson is paid to write – the man has a way with words.

To close this already long post, here is one more great passage from that interview that also resonates with me, particularly the point about “power-jewelry exclusivity”:

With a very few exceptions, contemporary luxury Swiss doesn’t appeal to me. I feel those watches have become power-jewelry exclusively, a class of archaic luxury item. Your phone tells more accurate time. I respond most to watches from the century in which they were utterly necessary. If someone offered me any free contemporary watch of my choosing, provided I’d promise never to resell it, I’d probably choose a Grand Seiko. I find their product, this century, more appealing than that of the Swiss.”

That’s a pretty great perspective and a good argument for collections to be more about vintage with one contemporary piece for wearing that reflects something truly new.

PS: If you are wondering what watches Gibson did keep, at least until 2015, check out the rest of the interview.

Step into Sacred Space.

What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful…there’s a word for it: authentic

Vulnerability is a scary thing. We don’t want to look weak. We don’t want people to pity us or judge us. We know we can’t be perfect, but we don’t want to seem too imperfect.So often, we think our imperfections are our flaws. However, we shouldn’t confuse the two or make them interchangeable. Because our imperfections…

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Being authentic is immensely liberating,
for it gives permission to others
to be authentic as well.

And when we are being authentic,
(instead of trying to survive or win out over each other)
connectedness flourishes,
we create amazing things,
and joy, generosity, and love abounds.

daughterofanarcissistwoman:

“Children stay in alignment with their true self if the important adults in their lives support doing so. However, when they’re criticized or shamed, they learn to feel embarrassed by their true desires. By pretending to be what their parents want, children think they’ve found the way to win their parents’ love. They silence their true selves and instead follow the guidance of their role-selves and fantasies. In the process, they lose touch with both their inner and outer reality.”

Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents

daughterofanarcissistwoman:

“The greatest wound a child can receive is the rejection of his authentic self. When a parent cannot affirm his child’s feelings, needs, and desires, he rejects that child’s authentic self. Then, a false self must be set up. In order to believe he is loved, the wounded child behaves the way he thinks he is supposed to. This false self develops over the years and is reinforced by the family system’s needs and by culture. Gradually, the false self becomes who the person really thinks he is. He forgets that the false self is an adaptation, an act based on a script someone else wrote. It is impossible to be intimate if you have no sense of self. How can you share yourself with another if you do not really know who you are? How can anyone know you if you do not know who you really are?

One way a person builds a strong sense of self is by developing strong boundaries. Like the borders of a country, our physical boundaries protect our bodies and signal us when someone is too close or tries to touch us in an inappropriate way. Our sexual boundaries keep us safe and comfortable sexually. (People with weak sexual boundaries often have sex when they don’t really want to.) Our emotional boundaries tell us where our emotions end and another’s begin. They tell us when our feelings are about ourselves and when they are about others. We also have intellectual and spiritual boundaries, which determine our beliefs and our values. When a child is wounded through neglect or abuse, his boundaries are violated. This sets the child up for fears of being either abandoned or engulfed. When a person knows who he is, he doesn’t fear being engulfed. When he has a sense of self-value and self-confidence, he doesn’t fear being abandoned. Without strong boundaries, we cannot know where we end and others begin. We have trouble saying no and knowing what we want, which are crucial behaviors for establishing intimacy.”

Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child by John Bradshaw