June 30, 2009

On youth and authenticity

This idea of authenticity is tiring. The need to prove the excellency of one’s life choices, music taste, or neighborhood is a nauseating rhetoric of life in the city, an especially annoying habit of the young and the alternative. Others boast and I stay silent. Others criticize my choices and try to make me feel like a person of less worth because I sometimes deviate from some perpetuated idea of the “cool” and I cringe.

Are you serious? Are we still playing this game?

The back and forth - the smug sense of self-worth derived from things acquired and places appropriated - is a competition that needs to end. It appears to stand for something to keep one occupied, to give meaning to an existence without a clear definition.

I understand the need to have meaning in one’s life and to feel as if there is purpose in one’s existence. What annoys me though is the competition, the disgust with choices seemingly made within “the mainstream.” I frankly don’t understand why I have to defend my choices to live up to other people’s ideals.

There is a belief that the mainstream strictly criticizes and yet I often find myself attacked by others who identify as other than the mainstream for “conforming” when I should rebel. My personhood is questioned because of clothing choices. My “authenticity” is rejected because of the neighborhood in which I live, for which I say, get over it.

I can counter that my life as a Black female in the United States gives me “authenticity” by default, but because this competition is so endless, so banal, I won’t even suggest the idea.

To say that you believe that others should live life on their own terms and not conform to society’s dictates and then criticize someone else for ultimately not conforming to your beliefs of what it means to live outside of the mainstream is fucking stupid.

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