Authenticity is an interesting concept. People often address it when they say things like, "Let's get real". People understand what it's like to be dealing with someone who is manipulative, superficial, or "unreal".

In 2002 Walsh and McElwain wrote, "Authenticity involves a radical openness to the world, to others, and to one's own experience; it involves honest and direct confrontation with the givens of existence toward the end of living in conscious harmony with them."

Thus, Abraham, Kierkegaard's exemplar of faith, chose against the moral absolute, suspending the ethical in order to follow his faith in God. Abraham's motives were opaque to any outside observer and his behaviour defied reasonable ethical interpretation. It is this radically individual and subjective faith that transcends external ethical commandments and standards, demanding that, come what may, a person must be congruent with him or herself.

That is not easy to do. For one thing, many people are not really paying attention well enough to discern what accords with their ultimate concerns and core values. When Pilate asked Jesus "What is truth?" he was speaking for most people who live today. At any given time one of us might ask, "What is my truth?"

Authenticity is a matter of living the truth about oneself, which presupposes that a person actually knows him or herself. People have wondered for centuries if there might be a "self" inside somewhere that can be discovered. The classic statement of the mid-life crisis is, "I've got to find myself", but where can one find that? There is no outward trip, no spa, no guru outside oneself that can lead the way. Rather, it's a matter of settling down into the daily process of experiencing in which one finds such things as attraction or revulsion, interest or boredom.

My wife and I have begun to differentiate. Really. She has different appreciations of colour and style. That's fine, but when people realise such differences, it's not always easy living with such difference. Relationships are about such differences, however. Unless people are willing to be real with one another, they won't get to the place of differentiation, and it's differentiation that leads to interest and relational energy, and ultimately to intimacy. Without the willingness to be different, people play charades with one another and put on false selves.

When people differentiate, it is because they realise that some things feel like "me" and others like "not me". As my therapist once said, "It's one thing not to do what you want, but it's another thing not to even know what you want."

Knowing oneself is a matter of ego. The Greek word for "I" is ego, and the strength of a person's ego is not really just a matter of how important he or she thinks they are. Karl Jaspers stated that ego strength was composed of ego-vitality [awareness of existence], ego-activity [awareness of one's own performance], ego-consistency [unity of the self], ego-demarcation [self as distinct from the outside world], and ego-identity [identity of the self]. A lack in ego-performance, for instance, results in disturbances of self-regulation – self-determined acting, feeling, thinking, and perceiving – while lack of self-identity results in weakening of the subjective sense of who one is, one's experience of self.

The founders of gestalt therapy described the ego as the system of identifications that takes deliberate sensory-motor action as if isolated from its situation.

"…organic need is restricted to the goal, perception is controlled, and the environment is not contacted as the pole of one's existence but is held at a distance as 'external world', to which oneself is an extrinsic agent. What is felt as close is the unity of goal, orientation, mean, control, etc., and this is precisely the actor itself, the ego." (Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman, pp. 379-80).

If I merely smile and thank my wife for purchasing clothes that have the feel of "not me", all the while wondering what I am going to do with them, then I would be acting out of "bad faith". To act in bad faith is to avoid the risk that faith requires, for faith always comes as the bridge across uncertainty, and often the anxiety of any given situation comes from the uncertainty over what might happen to oneself if one is authentic at any given moment. To remain true to oneself, to speak and act on one's truth, is to manifest good faith, but to pull back, interrupting contact as an authentic, existing self, is to display bad faith. Thus, Emily Dickinson remained true to herself, acted in good faith, and rejected God, writing:

"Those – dying then

Knew where they went –

They went to God's Right Hand –

That Hand is amputated now

And God cannot be found –

The Abdication of Belief

Makes Behavior small –

Better an ignus fatuus

Than no illumine at all"

It's not easy being true to oneself. Others may not understand. Others may get hurt, feel disrespected, offended, left out, awkward, and so on. The finesse of expressing difference while all the while confirming commitment to a relationship, interest in another individual, and compassion is not easy. I believe it takes considerable skill and self-support to be authentic without having to prop oneself up with anger, roughness, distance, superiority, and other such crutches.

Being different doesn't mean having to be right. I can be me; I can be authentic without that necessarily meaning that you are some kind of "wrong". Frankly, the world is too complex and I am too limited to have everything some kind of "right". I've got all I can handle if I just settle for being me and being comfortable with that being different. I may resemble others or agree with them, but at some point the more authentic time we spend with one another, the more we will encounter our differences, and I choose that way of living my life.