What exactly is our authentic self?  A good question, with a fairly simple answer!   It’s about being you, showing up in this world as the true person who you ARE, oppose to the person the world has “told” you be.

Now the answer may be simple, it’s the believing and putting in action is where it sometimes gets a little blurry.   I was faced just recently with the whole notion of “authentic self”.   My grandmother passed away last week and I got a true vision of really living life being authentically you.  I guess the very last life lesson my grandmother shared with me.

As my family and I were preparing the funeral arrangements, a small, intimate gathering, one of the tasks was to write some facts, tidbits, about my grandmother for the Minister to share at the service. Since I seem to be the writer in my family, they looked to me to come up with the words, the stories, the facts.    Let me say I stared at a blank page for a very long time.   I began writing and read over my words and would do a “select all”, “delete”.   The problem was I wasn’t writing about her authentic self, I swear I could hear her voice in my head saying “Get it right…that’s all wrong!”

Let me be honest with you, my grandmother was a loving, wonderful women who taught me many things about life.  But…she was also a spitfire, she had no problems with telling you how she felt, even when you didn’t want to hear it. She was a British grandmother with very specific ideas of what a “lady” should be (you should have seen her reaction when I got my first tattoo…oh boy!).   She was opinionated and a no holds barred kind of lady and these were the traits that made her, who she was. She never tried to hide it, to be more politically correct, or to conform to what society deemed appropriate.  She wasn’t defined by her job or her role (wife, mother, grandmother).   It was a simple what you see, is what you get, if you don’t like it, oh well.   

She truly lived her authentic self (good, bad or indifferent) and as I began writing this testament to her life, I included all of this.  It was after all who she was.   And as I wrote, I realized that I, myself still sometimes get a little hung up on “who the world has told me to be.”  Lesson learned and one I soon won’t forget.

And, when the funeral came and the testament was read out loud, everyone “got it” and smiled at those “indifferent parts” as really it’s what we loved about her in the first place.  It was who she truly was and we were blessed to have her in our lives.