On integrity vs. authenticity
Dispatch #47: What genius thought up this state called humanness? And how do I honor it?
Hi friend,
If you’ve taken a writing class with me it’s 99.9999% likely that you’ve heard me quote Buckminster Fuller:
I'm obsessed with the fact that this wisdom comes from an architect (among many of Bucky’s gifts). What Bucky is talking about is not just metaphysical, but physical. The stakes are high. To keep a building intact, beams need to interact and fortify one another. Likewise, a staircase has properties that make it a staircase and not just a pile of planks. And a roof is not a floor for very good reasons. Without tension, the third floor of the house that I’m dwelling in right now would collapse.
We owe a great deal to structural integrity. From your buzzing coffee maker to the rooted oak outside your window to the cawing crow’s skeleton resting on its branch, tension is not optional, it’s a requirement. So it goes for architecture and biology, and so it goes for poetry. A poem maintains its integrity, I argue, through the interaction of its title, volta, and ending (among other things.) But that’s a lesson for another time. What’s important right now is what keeps me up at night: What is integrity? And how does it differ from authenticity? How can I recognize both out in the world? How can I foster them within myself?
In other words: What genius thought up this state called humanness? And how do I honor it?
•
The detective work regarding the difference between authenticity and integrity arrived a few years ago during a conversation with my brother and my wife at our living room table. My brother and I are notoriously fans of the Enneagram. About a decade ago, he’d typed both of us as 3s, but due to some enlightening conversations with his parter-at-the-time he was rethinking the matter.
For those of you who aren’t Enneagram aficionados, Enneagram 3s are concerned with achievement; specifically, with fighting off a deep sense of worthlessness through “best-ness.” The main struggle of a 3 is authenticity; how to be true to oneself instead of chameleon-ing for brownie points and status. My brother posed that his partner didn’t see 3ness in me at all, but rather that they thought I was… (at this point, my brother and Angel looked at each other and simultaneously said) “a 1.” The basic desire of an Enneagram 1 is goodness, balance, and (drum roll please) integrity. The diagnosis felt spot-on. I felt immediately outed by the two people who know me best. There was relief and even joy.
It was an affirmation that there is a core difference in seeking integrity versus authenticity. Both have been huge parts of my life as an artist and teacher, friend and daughter, thinker and feeler. Yet sitting there with my beloveds, I could feel deep in my gut a warm bright feeling lovingly, joyously, and protectively coiling around those gleaming nine letters. Integrity.
I felt my compass needle tremble and land on new questions: So then, what is a life journey toward integrity? How does it differ from a life journey toward authenticity?
•
Integrity stems from integer. An integer is a whole number, one that is not fractured (AKA not a fraction). We can think of integrity and integer as sharing qualities such as “intact, whole, complete.” I am less interested in the historically puritanical definitions of the word (“untainted, purity, correctness, blamelessness”) as purity is a construct often linked to whiteness, perpetuating countless violences among humankind.
When we think of integrity as “soundness, wholeness, completeness” I include mess, illness, and brokenness inside this definition. As the saying goes, there’s plenty of people who aren’t sick who are nonetheless not healthy, and plenty of people who are ill who are whole.
The bond between brokenness and integrity deserves our attention and study. In this detective work we have to blow up notions of perfection. “Any thought, word, or action that is oriented toward the wholeness of self, others, and relationships is one of integrity.”1
It was 2006. I had just turned 22. Now I sat in a small arts and crafts room in a mental hospital, brain fogged by medications, unsure of anything, a quiet wreck. In front of me was a small round table filled with old magazines.
Collage itself is anti-purity. It relies on ingenuity. It prioritizes the orientation toward wholeness over wholeness itself. The collage never claims ‘I began whole.’ Instead, it beckons the eye closer, announcing with gentleness, ‘See all the ways my fractures came together toward a sense of wholeness.’
No scissors were allowed in that small room so I tore the papers. In my collage, the size of a postcard, two people navigate the waves. One of them hunches over, as if barely escaping the sea’s uproar and leaving behind a rowboat. The other person raises a palm over their eyes, surveying the expanse. Or perhaps they’re gazing at the birds I’ve collaged above them. I think of that young woman in that mental hospital, how alone she was, how shattered. We all deserve birds in our sky. What was torn into place in a small room in Belmont reaches me now, almost two decades later.
There was a part of me, sitting there, making art, that knew I was whole.
•
Authenticity calls to mind a lack of fraudulence, how one might identify a real coin from a counterfeit. The notion of being “actual, genuine” and “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” Again, I’m not interested in authenticity as equated to pureness, or a policing of others for the sake of some ideal. I am, however, interested in authenticity as the genuine and perhaps singular expression a particular being emits. Could we call it Buddha nature? A dog being a dog? Not just any dog, but that dog expressing its own particular dogginess? Odyssey-ness? Fido-ness?
It seems that authenticity is a vehicle of self-expression. A way of staying true to oneself. A reaching in, pulling out, and sharing of one’s depths. Think of the artist authentic to her vision: it must reflect her.
Integrity, on the other hand, might be a barometer of one’s values. The greater one’s integrity, the more fine-tuned one is to the fluctuations of that barometer. Think of the artist with integrity to her vision: it must reflect her values.
•
It is often presumed that to be authentic, to have integrity, means a lack of ambiguity. Decisiveness as strength. I’ve been guilty of this.
Picture me in my therapist’s office. My therapist says, probably for the tenth time, “Something is true for us. Until a truer thing comes along. Then that’s the truth.”
Reader, I more than bristle. I want to put her in a headlock or hold her credentials under a hot flame. What do you mean ‘then that’s the truth?’ Doesn’t that mean the other thing was never true?
One unassailable truth, that’s what I’ve long been after without outright admitting it. One hook to hang one hat on. It’s where the Enneagram 1 personality can curdle, moving from integrity to zealotry. But my therapist, whether she meant to or not, was gently poking holes in my thick containers, my desire for order, rules, goodness, badness, everything separate, not mixing.
Can integrity and authenticity allow room for ambiguity, messiness, unfinishedness, and a less-than-courageous self wobbling along on fawn legs? Look around you. Where the world demands borders and labels and hierarchy, we’re doomed. Where the world is leaky, frothing, abundant, overlapping, curious, and mysterious, we’re saved.
It makes me think of this poem by Wisława Szymborska. (When am I not thinking of a poem by Szymborska?) “Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!” Leaky, indeed! We draw a line and call it law until we need to move the line. But nature pays no attention to such games. “And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms, would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?”
•
I recently found an abandoned painting of mine. It is based on a photograph of a monk visiting Salar de Uyuni, the salt flats where my medication, Lithium, comes from. Is the abandoned work not, in its own way, perfect? Is it not complete? Did it require my gaze, eight years later, to finish it? Time is the greatest collaborator. Letting go is a way of finding the truth.
•
I’ve been thinking about this golfer a lot. (What a sentence.)
Scheffler’s candor about impermanence and fulfillment feels subversive and thrilling. “What’s the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment. But it’s not fulfilling from the sense of the deepest place of your heart.”
While so many folks in the comments section are enlivened by and grateful for his honesty, it’s fascinating (AKA a trip) to watch other folks try to persuade him out of his feelings and convince him that he’s complaining or depressed or too rich to feel this way, or or or. And yet the simplicity of his realization stands, quaking the press room. He grapples aloud in front of us, laughing, “Why do I want this?” Integrity and authenticity have entered the building, unflinchingly.
•
Both integrity and authenticity can’t live without truth. Emily Dickinson wrote, “Truth is so rare it is delightful to tell it.” You can see the delight on the golfer’s face. And it’s what makes amazing stand-up comedy so naughty, so pleasurable: all that truth out in the open like that! So brazen! So bare!
Often when the truth comes, whether the truth is good news or bad news, relief follows. Because it is medicinal to be in line with reality. Delusion is a fun house mirror and once we’ve been freed from its eye contact, my god, there’s a whole gorgeous undistorted world out there.
•
There’s paradox here, folks. We can be broken and whole. We can be messy and have inherent structural integrity. We can discover an unfinished work and suddenly find it complete. (Yes, by unfinished work, I do mean you and me and her and them, I do mean us all.) Paradox reigns! Ambiguity animates the world around us! Mystery glows through all the cracks! One truth can replace another truth without debunking it, so says my therapist! And perhaps most paradoxically, our authenticity and integrity don’t necessarily rise out of thinking or planning or striving to know, but out of something far more receptive, wild, and widening.
The meditation teacher Teure Sala2 says, “Our wisdom doesn’t come from knowing what to do, but in just being available. What happens is that our awareness becomes steady, not the habit. So in a world of constant fluctuating and changing, our steadiness, our groundedness, foundation, the thing we have faith in - is not our knowing - it becomes our awareness.”
•
For those of you in the New York area I’m offering my first in-person writing class in a long time this Fall/Winter through Brooklyn Poets. I’m thrilled! You can use the code SUPEREARLY to save $25 (offer ends August 17th.)
•
Prompts:
Consider that there is dignity in telling the truth, whether the truth is good or bad news. What’s a piece of truth that’s been caught in your teeth? What are you willing to say today?
When do you feel most you? On the soccer field, with your best friend, or alone in front of the sea? How do you express your youness? What does it feel like? What parts of your body do you use?
How are creativity and authenticity linked for you?
Grab a pen. For five minutes, let your gut speak. Let it have its own voice. Let the persona guide you. Allow yourself disgust, surprise, awe, anger, whatever the gut wants to say.
Grab a pen. For ten minutes, imagine you’re at a press conference about your job. Say all the unsayable things. What’s fulfilling? What’s not? Be transparent. Be silly. Be brazen. Be jellyfish see-through.
Which do you need more of today: integrity or authenticity? How might you invite them to show up? Create an altar to the one of your choice. What objects can you set upon that altar? What food could you offer? What scents? What texts?
Inhale. Give yourself permission to be fluid, unconcrete, everchanging. Exhale.
With maple syrup,
The Difference Between Integrity and Authenticity, Turning West
love all your articulations around ambiguity and paradox! authenticity + integrity are some of my favorite values or touchstones as well. funny enough, as i was reading this i realized that i have a book called 'the way of integrity' by martha beck in my cart from last night. just ordered it! AND: i am so here for this golferrrrr.
I love and deeply admire Tuere Sala!