In all seriousness though, this is also going to make potential relationships, friends, and clients hate your guts. This is a good thing. They’re people who would only like a false you, and you want them to be driven away.

The price of authenticity is haters. https://twitter.com/lilearthmother/status/1287942398673289218

The price of inauthenticity is that you may feel well-liked, but the person they like won’t really be you. It’ll be some other person, the one you’re inauthentically pretending to be, who wins the praise and admiration.

So the choice is: Be authentic and win friendship and admiration from people you actually want it from at the cost of those you don’t want it from not giving it; or be inauthentic and create a false mask for people to like instead of liking you.

All this to underscore and counterpoint the amount of weight the world “aligned” is carrying in the original tweet, which is a good tweet and sparked me to go off on this rant finally.

I just also feel like it’s not helpful to skip past the *people will fucking hate your guts if you’re authentic* part. That shit hurts if you’re not super resilient. We’re hardwired to react to social rejection as a deadly threat.

So give yourself time and space with this

The people who hate you for it will be a small but non-zero portion of the people you encounter. The resiliency is helpful in remembering that they’re a small portion because otherwise your monkey brain will make the haters way too loud.

Actually now that I think about it, sometimes it really is most people that will hate you for who you are when you live authentically. Like for example if you’re trans. That’s why developing supportive community is so important, but you can only do that when you live your truth.

So like, sometimes living inauthentically so you don’t get murdered is necessary and we shouldn’t blame people for that.