From Integrity to Authenticity (Part I)

Creating a career that aligns with my Superpower

Like many elementary schools, mine included, the walls of my daughter’s home from 9am to 4pm each day are graced with the virtues she, as a Rocket, should both embody and aspire to. It’s curious to me that the administration at her school decided on these values, namely, I imagine, to match the six letters of the word R-O-C-K-E-T-S, without any input from those who are supposed to live out said values. They’re not bad values, per se, and largely ones I would hope she possesses anyway, but they’re not her values, nor ours.

Authenticity is my virtue, my value, the one I want written on my t-shirt and my gravestone. The phrase “what you see is what you get” makes solid sense to me. Except I only just discovered this, having battled my entire life with a values list that starts with letters other than the one I needed. There’s no “A” in R-O-C-K-E-T-S, for example, and while I worked hard to achieve the desired list of preferred characteristics out of my propensity for rule following, I never saw myself in those values. Never connected with one as my core contribution to the world.

This is my new favorite and quite original. Who even needs to use the first letter when you can pick any letter you want? At least this one has an “I”.

So, “integrity” became my stand in. The name of my elementary school did not have an “I” in it, and I can’t remember what the mascot was at the time, nor does it appear that there even is one now, but perhaps we played a different letter game back then. Wherever it came from “I for Integrity” became a phrase I took on as my own. I think I was even the “I” in some sort of original school musical gone awry.

I could be counted on, teacher’s pet that I was. I did tell the truth. I absolutely ratted on kids doing bad things. I followed a strict moral code, even if it's one I made up. I had “I for Integrity.”

I never recognized the rigidity in integrity, the “firm adherence to a code”, the intolerance to flexibility, adaptability, or, my never favorite…the and/both. Integrity was another way that I delineated right from wrong, in others, yes, but more importantly, in myself. Like algebra, there was a finite combination of things that made up a correct answer, no “almost right”, no partial credit. And I liked math. Unsurprisingly, I was also really really good at math. I wanted to be that good at integrity. Always the virtuous child who made the right choice. Except I was a human child. One navigating a complicated world where I played adult at home while my mom scrambled to get her shit together after my parent’s divorce. Even after things settled, some days I was the parent, and some days I was the child. It’s difficult to know what integrity looks like when you are unsure if the evening’s task is finishing homework or balancing the checkbook.

But I’ve held firm to integrity as my calling card throughout my life, bastardizing the actual definition to better fit all the things that I am. Dependable, reliable, honest, incorruptible (that last one got dicey in my twenties).

Except I am also abrasive…and direct, decisive, defiant. I stick up for the little guy and abuse the bully. I follow the rules, the moral code, per se, if I agree with them or at least the spirit of them, but I’ve also been known to say “fuck the rules” a time or two when said rules are just dumb.

It turns out, integrity is not the word I was looking for all of those years ago. Not the value that I naturally embody.

It was authenticity. True to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.

Now that, that fits my skin.

And so as I begin to live into that superpower, the one that actually feels like my costume and cape, I’m evaluating how to apply it to this new career I’m creating. My personality is to dig for the story. My spirit is most interested and inspired by complicated, messy, untold stories. And my character demands that the opportunity to tell that story be available to everyone, equally, or as equally as I’m capable of making it.

As of late, that authenticity has been more intentionally shaping how I direct my career, where I spend my energy, and why.

And it calls me to ask the question…How will the clients that need me, find me?

More on that next week.