“You do you.” It’s a phrase I hear often at Georgetown, as students acknowledge and encourage each other in their quirky idiosyncrasies. When my classmate declares that she wants to start a full-fledged vegetable garden in her dorm room, the appropriate response is, “You do you, girl.” When my friend’s roommate decides to spend her summer hiking the Appalachian Trail, I supportively respond, “You do you!” Though it gets thrown around a lot for a wide range of behaviors and attitudes, I don’t deny that “you do you” expresses a liberating ideal of authenticity, or of being true to oneself, that is very important to pursue in a world in which we are constantly pushed into a limited number of acceptable life paths.
At a social level, “you do you” celebrates a form of resistance to conforming to the norm. This attitude inspires us to take on the wonderful wealth of lifestyles and experiences available to us as humans and for that reason should be promoted. It also figures into social progress, as individuals empowered to be different break the bars of the prisons we’ve constructed for ourselves. But I fear that sometimes, at the individual level “doing me” becomes my way of publicly—and privately—asserting my difference from others in a contrarian way, rather than me simply living as I am.
As we present ourselves to the world, we construct a personality. This personality is informed not only by who we perceive ourselves to be, but also who we aspire to become. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this construction, because it helps us navigate the geography of our social lives and live fruitfully in a social world. However, this constructed self becomes problematic when it becomes no more than an empty shell, “No more,” as punk rocker Penny Rimbaud puts it, “than a costume of ideas.”
To really live up to the ideal of authenticity, then, “doing you” requires a more fundamental act: “being you.” To extend Rimbaud’s metaphor, to be oneself is to be she who dons the costume of ideas while remaining aware that she, herself, is not defined by or restricted to her current outfit.
Discerning the naked self from the jazzy, complex outerwear is difficult. This is especially true at Georgetown, where we tend to define ourselves on multiple, very specific metrics with very specific expectations. Sometimes, these expectations are predominantly externally-imposed (“I’m a Philosophy major.” “I’m a Carroll Fellow.”), and other times, internally-imposed (“I’m an alternative musician.” “I want to be thin.”) Though it’s not easy to step out of these elaborately built identities to recognize who one really is.
The importance of being myself, and of being comfortable with who I am, hit me straight on last semester. I hadn’t realized before that time that my close friends heavily influenced the idea I had of myself: as funny, as intelligent, as enjoyable to be around, for example. Being one of the few in my group of friends that stayed at Georgetown while everyone else went abroad, I felt lost. Moreover, I began an intellectually transformative period, realizing that my true interests strayed far from the academic path I had chosen to pursue. I felt as if many of the things that made my life worthwhile in my previous years at Georgetown were no longer present. I couldn’t “do me” as I had in the past, because my costume had suddenly become more threadbare, and the audience had changed.
So I began to reflect. I reflected on what I really wanted to study, on who I really wanted to be and on what it meant for me to be Patricia in this world. And radically new interests, like expressionist art and opera music. In fact, in this sense, performing new ideas became a way of testing the boundaries of who I am—defining myself negatively, if you will. But unlike before, these performances were carried out with a deep level of self-awareness that brought my life closer to the ideal of authenticity.
I’m still in the process of searching, understanding, and cultivating myself. Perpetually searching for the best answers to this type of question is one of the qualities that makes us human, I think. And that’s why, as I continue to “do me” and encourage others to “do them,” I’ll try not to forget to be myself.
