My last post created a spark of reconnection in my little corner of the internet. Old clients, community members, and social media followers reached out to check in, share their reactions to it and some even asked if there was a waitlist for whatever I had coming next (more on that at the end)!
Before I get into today’s piece, I just want to tell y’all how much I so enjoyed every message, reflection, gif and excitement to dive back into whatever I have to offer (I am honored that y’all trust in me and my work the way you do).
From those exchanges came a question that I have gotten a few times, but this time I think my answer has changed ... because I am not the same person as I was the last time I answered it. Buckle up babes, today I made time 🤗.
Question:
How do you overcome fear to become your authentic self? I second-guess myself, but I want to live authentically too. How did you get to be so unapologetic in who you are?
Before I share my answer to this let’s start with a little disclaimer PSA of sorts shall we dears?
We are all so beautifully different and diverse. No two people are the same. We share similarities, we see ourselves and our experiences in others and we connect through a communal human experience. So yes, it is absolutely helpful and useful to bear witness and be witnessed.
But, and, also….my journey is my own.
What worked for me may not work for you. There is no universal formula. It is my perspective, my lived experience, a blueprint and guide you can borrow from while figuring out what authenticity looks like in your own life. Hearing me speak about my own experience can light your path, but the path you walk, and need to walk will be entirely your own!
The first time I chose my full self
So, let’s get into it! The truth is, my path to “authentic living”, which I just call being fully liberated, was neither linear nor particularly graceful.
I can remember, however, the first time I made the decision to say “the thing” and do “the thing”; the first time I decided to be the version of myself that I knew flew in the face of “respectable society” (if you are knew here my general reference to respectable society is an all encompassing term I like to use for the ways in which we have been socialized, based on our identities, to behave in order to maintain the existing supremacist society and hierarchy that we live in).
It wasn’t intentional and, lemme keep it a buck, I was terrified.
I was fifteen years old, it was shortly after September 11th, 2001. The high school I attended in Oakland was a small, private, predominantly white institution. Like many wealthy PWIs, it was shaped by money, elitism, and a whole lot of whiteness. So you can imagine that, in the early 2000s, it was not exactly fertile ground for nuanced conversations about race, religion, power, or equity (it still isn’t fyi).
The school periodically hosted speakers during a program called Forum. Shortly after 9/11, they invited a man who was presented to us as an accomplished political advisor to the White House and expert on foreign relations, particularly in relation to Arab and Muslim communities. As he began “educating us” on the topic, he proceeded to espouse Islamophobia in front of the entire school. Some of what he said was not simply offensive. It was factually incorrect.
I remember the moment he described the Prophet Muhammad (saw) as the Muslim equivalent of Jesus and claimed that Muslims regarded Muhammad (saw) as God. That is not a minor doctrinal disagreement. It is the opposite of a central tenet of Islam. No one corrected him. Not the administrators who invited him. Not the adults responsible for vetting him. No one.
The following Tuesday, during school announcements, when students were given an opportunity to speak in front of the school, I walked onto that stage and called the school out. Please note: I had no plan, no script, I just knew I had to say something.
I challenged them for failing to properly vet someone they had invited to educate us. I named the Islamophobia. I corrected the factual inaccuracies. I questioned the relationship between the school’s existing sociopolitical culture and its willingness to give this man a platform. I asked whether they were truly educating us well if they believed what had happened was appropriate.
Then I got off the stage. Neeeeeeeeedless to say, it did not go over well. 😬
But that is the first moment I can remember fully committing to myself.
At the time, I didn’t think of it as authenticity or living unapologetically. I didn’t think of myself as brave or bold. I was scared of the consequences (I was a scholarship kid), especially because I already had a reputation for being disruptive, outspoken, and willing to challenge authority.
It was not easy to do. But it was an easy choice to make.
The choice was between staying silent while people were miseducated in ways that could perpetuate real harm, or saying something despite the consequences I might face.
To me, even then, the answer was clear. When you have the opportunity to do the right thing, doing the right thing is the only real choice available to you.
That moment was the moment that liberation moved from being something in my awareness to an ethos, a practice.
I did not become fearless. I became convicted.
Here is the part people often misunderstand. I did not speak because I felt strong. I spoke because I was clear. There is a difference.
Strength is often treated as the absence of fear. Much of what people perceive as strength in me is actually conviction, a clear understanding of what I believe to be just, equitable, honorable, and true.
That conviction does not make the trembles or that pit in my stomach any less real, and it certainly does not make the very real life consequences disappear.
My decision in September of 2001 affected the way certain teachers treated me. It shaped my experience at that school for years. I wanted to transfer almost every day. I hated being there.
Fun example - during my junior year, a group of lacrosse players (yes, yes they were) physically put me into a trash can. The school did nothing to protect me or reprimand them, instead they tried to place blame on me and some of the melanated senior boys who came to my aid. My senior year after a math teacher (yes, yes he was) made a wildly racist remark to me, about me, in front of the whole class. We all told the administration. That same administration attempted to kick me out of school because of how I “reacted”, because GOD FORBID someone reacts poorly to their math teacher being racist to them, especially at 17 (they weren’t successful). And yes, this math teacher continued to teach there for years.
I could tell you a story like this for almost every week I was in high school for the three years after I got up on that stage that Tuesday in September.
Showing up had consequences and I would still make the same choice.
At 15 I had made a decision, despite what may come,I had to remain in integrity with my own spirit, my notions of humanity and my understanding of collective liberation. People did not like me. People talked about me. Adults with power made my life more difficult. None of that changed what I knew to be right.
That is important because authenticity is often sold as a personal-branding exercise: wear what you like, embody your quirk, just stop caring what people think, and voilà, you are free.
But real authenticity, being unapologetic, pushing back against social norms and expectations, that is not an aesthetic. It is a practice of remaining in relationship with yourself and humanity, yours and others, especially when doing so costs you something.
Authenticity still requires discernment
I want to place a very large asterisk here. Not every situation is safe.
There have been and will continue to be moments when I have chosen not to “be authentic”: to speak publicly, challenge someone directly, set a boundary or say everything I wanted to say because it is not emotionally, physically, professionally, or materially safe to do so.
That is not cowardice. That is discernment.
I was more reckless when I was young because I, like many young people, believed that I was safer than I actually was aaaannndd let’s be honest, I had far less to lose than I do now at 40. As I’ve gotten older, I have become much more skilled at assessing risk.
Where am I safe? Where am I not safe? What protection do my social identities offer me in this space Where do my identities make me more vulnerable? What line can I push? What consequences am I willing and resourced enough to absorb?
Authenticity does not require us to abandon ourselves in the name of proving that we are brave.
Sometimes the most authentic choice is to speak. Sometimes the most authentic choice is to leave. Sometimes it is to wait until you have more support. Sometimes it is to tell the truth only to the people who have earned access to it.
Visibility and advocacy without discernment is not liberation.
The path to living out loud
When I think about how I became capable of showing up as fully as I do now, I see three interconnected parts of the journey.
1. Find your true north
I don’t mean finding the perfect career or identifying one grand purpose that explains the rest of your life I mean finding the thing that orients you. What are your values? What do you believe? What is true for you beneath everything you were taught you were supposed to be? What principles do you want your decisions to reflect?
When you know your true north, other people’s reactions stop functioning as your compass.
That does not mean you stop caring about impact or accountability. It means popularity is no longer the standard by which you decide whether you are living well.
For me, justice and collective liberation are part of that orientation. When I am rooted in those values, decisions that might otherwise feel complicated become clearer. Will everyone like what I say? Definitely not! Could it cost me an opportunity? It has, from high school to just this past year.
Am I willing to abandon my values to preserve the comfort of people who benefit from my silence? No.
Purpose does not eliminate fear. It simply gives fear less authority.
2. Unlearn the person you were socialized to become
You cannot find your authentic self without confronting the forces that taught you to abandon that self.
All of us have been socialized. For example, for me as a melanated girl I absorbed messages from society and family about what it meant to be “good,” ladylike, attractive, feminine, desirable, successful and worthy of love. I learned what kind of girl boys were supposed to want. I learned how much confidence was considered acceptable before it became arrogance. I learned how direct I could be before it became aggression or I was a bitch. I learned how visible I could be before someone decided I needed to be humbled. I was not exempt from any of that. I had to unlearn it.
When I was younger, I sometimes chose authenticity while quietly but constantly worrying that people might not like me, I might upset someone, or I may no longer be included in something. Now I understand that I am all of the right things for all of the right people, places, communities and opportunities.
I stopped caring if a friend, family member or community member found fault with me especially if it was over my values or my boundaries. I no longer made choices from a place of concern that a prospective client may not hire me or a random person online dislikes how I speak, what I believe, or how I explain something.
The people with whom I am truly aligned will be drawn to the person I actually am, not the person I could exhaust myself performing.
That shift required deep decolonial work. There is a colonial voice inside all of us: the internalized voice of the systems we were raised within. It tells us to conform, compete, dominate, disappear, perform, produce, and seek legitimacy through proximity to power.
Then there is the voice of our authentic self. Most of us have been trained to mute the second voice while amplifying the first. The work is not necessarily to destroy the socialized voice. Sometimes it contains information that can help us assess risk and survive. But it should not be the voice making decisions.
We have to learn to turn its volume down long enough to hear ourselves again.
3. Learn how to create safety for yourself
Authenticity aka your liberated self, becomes much more accessible when you know how to take care of yourself.
When I feel activated, I ask myself:
Am I actually unsafe? Am I triggered or emotionally activated because this situation resembles something from my past? Am I moving toward an emotionally reactive or trauma-based response? What do I need in order to feel grounded? Do I need support? Do I need more information? Do I need to speak now, speak later, or not speak at all? Learning to regulate your nervous system does not mean learning to tolerate mistreatment with a smile. It means developing enough internal steadiness to recognize what is happening and choose your response rather than being consumed by it.
Safety is also collective.
Part of discernment is recognizing when your identities give you protection that someone else does not have. In those moments, I ask myself: If I do not say something, who will?
If we are not orienting our choices toward justice and collective liberation, then we are often simply navigating the world through complacency.
I know what it feels like to need someone whose identities offer them more protection to step in, speak up, or stand beside me. It doesn’t always have to be on the “big” social things either, it can be as simple as having a parent stand beside you in the aftermath of confront an elder family member or a homeboy subtly alerting a creeper man that you are in fact with men who do not play about you when out in public.
So I have made a commitment to do that for others when I can with intentionality.
4. You have to fall in love with your whole self
The fourth major part of my journey was learning to love myself deeply. I mean loving myself enough to embrace my imperfections and pieces I am less confident about alongside the parts of me that are “impressive” and easy to celebrate.
I had to learn to accept and make room for the fact that embracing my humanity is not just the way we fight for and protect it but acknowledging that the beauty of it is in its multiplicity and messiness. It is complicated. Imperfect. Sometimes contradictory. Sometimes wrong. Sometimes radiant. Sometimes still healing. Regardless of what it may or may not be, it and I am deeply lovable.
I had to come home to myself and learn to enjoy living there. Once you know yourself and love the person you find, random opinions lose much of their power.
Does someone not like how I speak? Okay. Someone does not like my face? Cool. Do they think I am too tall, too loud, too direct, too political, not political enough, too soft, too much, or not enough?
As long as I know that I am not hurting anyone, causing or perpetuating harm AND if I am alerted to the fact that I might have, I am accountable and course correct….well then I am standing ten toes down on who I am, what I said and how I said it because I meant it!
Someone somewhere will always have something to say. That is between them and whatever unresolved thing inside of them is reacting to me.
It does not belong to me and I did the work to ensure that I did not take ownership or internalize it!
Authenticity is not a destination
None of this means I never second-guess myself. I still experience imposter syndrome. I still have moments of “should I….”? And if I’m being perfectly frank, sharing the softness or vulnerability is actually so much harder than being bold and loud for liberation.
A client and community member recently told me how meaningful it has been to watch me become more publicly open and tender. I told them that this softness is not new. I have always been this person. What has changed is my capacity to resource myself, to provide myself with enough safety that I can do the “scary” thing. That is another layer of authenticity.
The work is not finished because you finally told one truth, set one boundary, left one relationship, posted one vulnerable thing, or challenged one person in power.
Healing and liberation are not linear.
I would love to tell you that you reach a certain level and suddenly graduate from insecurity forever. You do not. Old narratives still get loud. Old fears return. Old socializations reappear. Trauma finds new doors.
The difference is that I now have the tools and practices to care for myself when they do. When imposter syndrome appears, I know how to remind myself that I really do this!!!!! I am that girl!
When I begin comparing myself to someone else, I am soft and tender with myself and tell myself the same simple truth I began this post with: nobody else is me and that is precisely the point.
When an old wound gets activated, I know how to slow down, ground myself, seek support, and discern what I actually need.
The strength people see is not the absence of struggle. It is the result of years of learning how to hold myself through it.
I had to come apart many times. I had to fall apart many times.
I had mentors, therapists, guides, books, podcasts, examples of modeled behavior, loving community, and a deep commitment to being uncomfortable without abandoning myself. (We were never meant to liberate ourselves alone.) I did not get here alone. And I do not recommend that you try to do this alone either.
So, how do you become your authentic self?
You begin by learning who you are beneath your conditioning. You identify the values that will orient your life. You examine which beliefs are truly yours and which were handed to you by systems that benefited from your silence and contortion into a mold it created to benefit itself.
You learn how safety feels in your body. You build the capacity to care for yourself when fear arises. You surround yourself with people who can love you without requiring you to perform. You fall in love with your whole self, not just the polished parts.
And then you practice.
You tell one truth. You make one aligned choice. You let one person see you more clearly and vulnerably.
You survive being misunderstood. You repair when you cause harm. You begin again when you backslide.
Eventually, authenticity stops feeling like a performance of bravery and starts feeling like coming home.
Not because the world has become completely safe. Not because no one will judge you. Not because you are never afraid. But because you have learned that you can trust yourself to remain by your own side; and that, more than strength, is what allows you to live out loud.
W/ tenderness,
Weeze