“Having followed your blog for a few years, I am delighted to see the evolution you are experiencing and sharing. Your openness about love, care, and hope, as you sometimes stumble, models such honesty and authenticity. It’s so refreshing. Even when I disagree with you, I respect that so much. And your photography is genuinely remarkable. Thanks, Jon.   —    Barbara.

Thank you, Barbara.

I appreciate her message for several reasons and perhaps more than she knows.

It’s kind and generous, of course, and I like that, but it is also honest.

She acknowledges my “stumbles,” as she so gracefully put it, and she also acknowledges disagreements.

Like a genuinely moral and authentic person, she can also see beyond those feelings to the things we humans can decide to respect about one another.

It is okay to be different.

The inability of so many millions of our fellow citizens to do this has our Grand Republic in an angry and fearful turmoil.

Our ideas about leadership and character seem to be coming apart, and the connection between our authenticity and our leadership is becoming more apparent – and more significant –  every day.

An entire political movement has emerged based on lies, cruelty, and the refusal to acknowledge stumbles.

I thought it essential to write about the process of authenticity.

In many ways, when we talk about politics and morality, we are talking about authenticity. This, in my experience,  is central to being a whole human being. But it all boils down to the individual and their ideas about authenticity and how we can find it.

I began seeing the centrality of authenticity in my life when I realized – mostly in talking therapy and in my miserable and troubled life – that I was not authentic.

As a therapist pointed out, I was a hider, not a liar. I hid much of my life from others and was selfish and dishonest, sometimes out of fear or anger.  I learned to hide from parents who were relentlessly critical and angry with me.

I lied to myself all the time to hide from me.

This realization burst like a flooded dam in my consciousness and unconsciousness.

I set out to understand authenticity and unleash the honesty and authenticity I knew was locked up inside me.  I went in search of me, the real one.

The therapists said this trouble wasn’t my fault, but I decided it was and took responsibility for it. Blaming other people got me nowhere.

I learned that authenticity is essentially about being who you are, even when everyone around you tells you to be someone else or that you are someone else.

I talked to many people, professionals and otherwise, about authenticity and began to see some common ground and consensus concerning it and what it was.

Authencity, I learned, is essentially about three things: vulnerability, transparency, and integrity.

Authenticity demanded that I own up to my flaws, fears, and weaknesses. That is what it means to be vulnerable.

Authenticity requires the seeker to stop needing external approval to feel good about their actions and decisions. We live in a world where people telling others they should feel bad about themselves is epidemic, especially when it comes to the social catastrophe that we call social media (what a misnomer that is!)

We live in a world – social media – where we learn to hide the reality of our lives and appear happier and more robust than we are. Yet we are all afraid, at certain times and in specific ways. Admitting this is central to finding authenticity.

Authenticity becomes a practice, like prayer, yoga, running, exercise, meditation,  reading, and ministering.

It is not, I realized, about something I had or didn’t have.

It was a practice – a conscious choice of how  I wanted to live and the strength and courage to believe in it. The nature of the practice for me was letting go of the person I was supposed to be and embracing the person I was.

This was especially difficult and painful because I didn’t care much for the person I had become.

I first had to learn who I was, accept it, and feel good about it.

That isn’t done in an hour or a day. Whining and self-pity don’t help.

It has taken me years to get where I am, and I have more years to do.

This process unleashed a great deal of anger in me. When people told me what to write and think and how to be, it triggered a kind of rage in me. They were, mostly unknowingly, assaulting the fragile sense of identity I was working so hard to establish.

I will soon run out of years at my age, so this is a matter of some urgency to me, and messages like Barbara’s are important because they suggest I am on the right track, even if the end is not in sight, may never be attainable.

Authenticity doesn’t come in a Holy Moment, like in Hollywood Movies. It is long and hard work.  It is worth it. It will be challenged every single day by people it threatens or anger.  It is worth every second of trouble.

It took more courage than I imagined just to be myself.

It felt like standing on a rail track as the lights of a speeding train got closer.

The tricky thing about a blog where one writes openly about his life every day is that there is no place to hide over time.  Every part of your being will be exposed.

The good thing is that one’s true self can finally be shown and seen. Like photographs, you really can’t lie over time.

Creating this blog was one of the best decisions I ever made. The blog is the story of my life. It is all about authenticity, in one way or another.

I knew there was no chance of this working if I couldn’t be honest and open. That became my daily practice.  I didn’t disclose everything in my life, but I promised myself never to lie about it.  Mostly, that is a promise I have kept.

Before I write a word, I ask myself two questions: what is happening in my life today? Is it the truth?

On the blog, I learned to acknowledge my mistakes and not hide or run from them.  This wasn’t easy. At first, I had no choice. Over time, it became a practice.

It is not, I saw, enough to be authentic. I needed to be fearlessly authentic; I had to move backward before I moved forward. I had a lot of time to make up for. Thus the anger and the need to strike back at my authenticity thieves, as I called them.

I had to look deep inside myself, recognize my limitations, faults, flaws, and lies, and first face the truth about myself. That is a painful thing to do. That’s the fearless part.

Authencity is now one of the essential things in my life.

Authencity is complex yet simple at the same time. It is a series of daily and never-ending choices that must be made every day, sometimes many times a day.

It’s about the challenge of being truthful and showing up. It is a choice to be honest,  even when it hurts. To open ourselves up and be seen.

The next step was to think long and hard about who I wanted to be. I relished that challenge, and with some excellent and powerful help, I came to see the person I was. I came to like him. He wasn’t great, but he was good enough. And could get better.

The challenge was not to change who I was but to be who I was. It was hard to get my head around that, but once I did, I felt authenticity was within my grasp. I just had to remember the practice every day of my life.

Like any other addict or broken person, I could never claim to be well, only to keep working to be healthy. Every day I ask myself what am I doing that I want to be doing and should be doing. And then I do it.

This practice has changed my life so that someone like Barbara, whom I don’t know and will probably never meet, can see where I am trying to go and respect it.

Authenticity is about acknowledging my many faults and struggles (and stumbles), but it is also about being honest.  My writing demands that I do that, and so does my blog.

On the blog, I was finally able to be transparent. I have nothing to hide; a thousand cement blocks have been lifted from my soul.

When you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

Historians say that authenticity is the most precious quality in a leader. Leaders who lie cannot be authentic, and those who follow them cannot be sound, honorable, or grounded.

Abraham Lincoln was authentic, and that, say historians, was a primary reason he was so loved and remembered.

The spiritualists I read have written – to a one – that the secret is not struggling to fit in but loving, accepting, and embracing all parts of yourself, the good and the bad.

Authencity does not make me perfect, noble, or better than anyone else. It just makes me me.

I am becoming the person Barbara sees on my blog, not a saint, not a great person, not a perfect person. Just someone is learning to embrace who he is and, in so doing, find peace, love, and joy, and it frees me to do some good for other human beings.

Authencity is at the core of all of this. I want to be about love, caring, and honesty. That leads to hope.

Authenticity is the gate through which I can enter this radiant and special place.