THE MAP OF YOU

or How Big Is Your Neighborhood?

Hi. It's Eva from Wild Authentic Xplore where we examine what it takes to live an authentic life to experience more overall confidence, happiness, impact, and ease. The better life that begins to emerge as we live more in keeping with who we really are.

Recently, we've been talking about the role that experience plays in an authentic life. The role that our everyday experiences—what we think, feel, and sense in each moment—have, and how understanding more of what we experience contributes to understanding more of who we are.

Today, I want to push off in a slightly different direction. It’s still related to exploring our experience, but this time, to what we have yet to experience. Exploring whatever is outside our current experience.

Exploring the unknown came up in my last post that looked at authenticity and democracy, and it also surfaced in a recent talk I gave, where someone raised the issue of narcissism and its relationship to authenticity. I think the point of the question was something like: “What if a narcissist is being authentic. Doesn’t being authentic in this situation just perpetuate more narcissistic behavior, more of what we don’t want? And if so, isn’t the notion of authenticity itself suspect?

I suppose embedded in the question was the subtle accusation that we all possess less than stellar aspects of who we are, and doesn’t the mantle of authenticity just give these less desirable traits permission and legitimacy? (I just love these talks!)

At the talk I offered just the barest response because I hadn’t thought too deeply about the question at that point, but the question has stuck with me. That question, and the point raised in my post on authenticity and democracy, has occasioned some further thinking which has ultimately brought me to one underlying concept, the one we’re going to talk about today. And it’s this:

Becoming more authentic is not just about acting on a more complete understanding of what we already know. It’s also about stretching into parts of ourselves we have yet to experience and doing so by exposing ourselves to what we have yet to experience.

And this is the concept I hope to unravel today. It’s a big one, so let me begin by breaking it down into its component ideas. I’ll just list them to start, and then offer an analogy to tie them together again and make things clearer. To those following my recent posts, these ideas should be familiar.

The first idea is that we come to understand the world, and ourselves, through our experiences (our feelings, thoughts, sensations, what I call three-channel awareness). The second idea—that really emerges from the first—is that limits to our experience not only limit what we understand about the world but will limit what we understand about ourselves as well. And the last idea says that we can expand what we understand, not only about the world at large, but ourselves as well, by expanding our experiences.

New experiences have the potential to spark new feelings, thoughts, sensations, and these new feelings, thoughts, sensations can open up whole new, and internal, landscapes. Areas of ourselves that exist, and can be explored, but which have not been explored. At least not yet. Consider this concept for a moment, and then let’s use an analogy to make the concept more visual.

Think about a map that truly and completely represents who you are, the full, unabridged map of you, if you will. The totality of you, the most complete and authentic you there is. Not just you as you currently understand yourself to be, but the you you could be if you but knew about these other aspects of yourself. Something like the present and potential you. See this map in your mind’s eye and make it as big and as glorious as you want it to be.

Now, this rendering of the map suggests you occupy but one part of it, maybe a large territory, maybe a small one. Perhaps a particularly rugged section in the top left quadrant of the map. And despite having legitimate claims to such a grand map in total, what you actually experience, your day-to-day experience, is rather meager by comparison.

Not because your map isn’t grand enough, but because you only live in, and thus experience, a small section of it.

The unexplored you of your map might right now be flourishing within the borders of vibrant cities, thrilled by thunderous and raging rivers, or quietly alive as a dessert is by night, whispering with the wandering of nocturnal creatures, guarded by stately, if now leaning cacti.

All this could be you, be yours, could enter your world through your experience of it IF you stepped into the experience of it.

Novel experiences tease at the edges of what we know, not just about the world, but of ourselves as well. As we both experience the new, and respond to the new, we experience ourselves anew.

What was my experience of the vibrant city? Did I like it, and if so, how so, and if not, why not? Did I encounter an entirely new experience within the borders of the city, something I’d never experienced before? Did I witness perhaps soaring architecture, homelessness, and did these experiences alter what I now think, feel, and sense about my own rugged terrain, and what I think in general? Did they create new markers by which to know myself, and thus markers by which to navigate? Did my new experience create a new understanding, not just of the world at large, but about myself, who I am and am uniquely?

Something very important is being pointed to here; a way to scale the boundaries of who we know ourselves to be to understand more of who we. The way is simple and direct; open yourself to new experiences.

While you consider this point, and to give you time to do so, let’s go back to that participant’s question on narcissism. I want to offer what I think, now that we have a shared language with which I can express it. Narcissists live in a very tiny neighborhood. Their “authenticity,” however authentic it might be to the point on the map in which they exist, is not authentic to who they are, the grand map, the true contours of their being. They operate—as do we all, really—from a truncated version of themselves, with all the distortions such a truncated version introduces.

Our lived experience is a fraction of what it could be, and the authentic self we profess to the world only a fraction of the authentic self we are.

Our authentic actions may be authentic to what we now know, and in that way “authentic enough,” but will they ever truly represent who we are authentically? I think not.

But in becoming ever more authentic—stretching into parts of ourselves that exist just beyond the borders we know and likely tend—we can come to know more of who we are. And in so doing, can unleash the many benefits that come to those who live an ever more authentic existence. Things like more ease, confidence, pleasure, purpose, and satisfaction.

This is why I advocate for not an absolute authenticity, which in my mind is unattainable, but an active authenticity, which seeks to understand more of who we are, to become ever more aligned with who we are through the actions we take. Ever more aligned with who we are and what we want, not only to know personal fulfillment, which is authenticity’s gift to us, but to leaven the world with our unique and needed gifts, which is its gift to all.

“Constricted neighborhoods” do have consequences, not just for ourselves, but for others as well. Which is why becoming ever more authentic is a good thing, not just for ourselves but for everyone as well.

Whoever you are, and whatever you struggle with, moving into more of who you are, in other words, occupying ever more of who you really are in all its promise, is possible for you. But to know more of who you are will ask something of you.

It will ask you to step into the unknown, to welcome new experiences—the other, the open water, the new horizon. It will ask you to stretch beyond your current understanding of who you and so requires courage and risk-taking. It’s both a call, and a challenge, which you can choose to answer or not, but which you can not escape.

But the call and challenge is also a gift. A way to discover more of who we are and can be, and thus the path toward more ease, aliveness, expansion, and freedom. Not just for ourselves, but for all.

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Note: For those following along in my book, Chasing the Wild Authentic, chapter twelve offers four soft skills for navigating the unknown.