Today is June 23 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you work at living an authentic life so that your true self is visible to others?”
American novelist, literary critic, and scholar Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for his novel Invisible Man, in 1953, wrote “All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself.”
As the narrator of Invisible Man struggles to arrive at a conception of his own identity, he finds his efforts complicated by the fact that he is a black man living in a racist American society.
Throughout the novel, the narrator finds himself passing through a series of communities, from the Liberty Paints plant to the Brotherhood, with each microcosm endorsing a different idea of how blacks should behave in society.
As the narrator attempts to define himself through the values and expectations imposed on him, he finds that, in each case, the prescribed role limits his complexity as an individual and forces him to play an inauthentic part.
As you go throughout your life, and day, are you awake enough to understand when the values and expectations imposed on you limit your complexity as an individual thereby forcing you to play an inauthentic role?
Ellison worked diligently live an authentic life so that others could see him. Do you?