the cost of authenticity

In my last blog post, I wrote the sentence Authenticity is Metabolically Expensive and the internet freaked out. (I will say I’m not the first person to have ever used that phrase, though I can’t remember who I heard it from.)

I was sitting in my chair one morning, hot cup of coffee in one hand and my journal in the other, begrudging how I’m not the person I’m meant to be, when I also wrote out how I’m underrating, not getting enough sunshine, and spending far more time sucked down a social media rabbit hole than I’d like. If you’ve read the Embodied Capacity Framework, you’ll know these are just a few of the pivotal things I talk about for working with our capacity.

Authenticity requires something of us, and in that moment I had nothing to give towards my own authenticity. My life felt like an energy mismatch because it was. And the story I was telling with how I was showing up in the world was one of shame.

I was on my mat the other day, engaging in some heart openers and physically widening my body, when I noticed pain in my back. I didn’t think anything of it; I’d probably just overdone it on my last weight training day. But then I noticed the tightness in my body was made worse every time I tried to expand, and was only made better by curling in. (Take note of this. Our bodies will always mirror back to us our reality. your body is not a liar.)

This shape - one of curling in, of making myself small, the shape of shame - is one I’ve subconsciously taken on for years when I don’t have the energy to support authentic expression. And now, despite all the work I’ve done, I noticed that when I’m not fueling myself, when I have low capacity, when I’m not in the flow of authentic energy, the default shape I take is one of shame. Even if I don’t want to, even if I tell myself I’m not that person anymore.

Authenticity is energetically expensive, and when we cannot sustain it, we will collapse into something. For some of us that might be shame and playing small. For other people it might be lethargy and the inability to get out of bed. What it looks like doesn’t matter. What does matter is there is a cost to this too. When we don’t have the energy to hold our new shape, we will revert into what we deem as less metabolically expensive, or easier to sustain.

Despite saying I wanted to be authentic, and saying I wanted to be self expressed and bold and embodying aliveness, I was creating an energetic mismatch for myself when the energy I was playing out was one of shame.

And then I wondered why I felt like shit.

Realizing it was the first part of the cycle. My therapist says noticing a problem, and thinking about it, is the first part of changing it. But I also knew there would be no changing the energetic mismatch without first adequately resourcing. I needed to give myself the energetic input to narrow that gap and make holding the shape of authenticity more sustainable.

There is no shame in reverting back to a shape that feels more familiar and less exhaustive (see what I did there?). And when we notice it, there lies a choice. Which energy are you going to embody? Which hard do you want?

I’d like to say having done this work, and now teaching about this work, I’ve mastered it but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I think this work is a continual coming back. It’s a continual resourcing, trying on new shapes, evolving and becoming something else.

Want to continue to explore this idea of what creating and sustaining new energy patterns looks like? The Embodied Capacity Framework is for you.