the Authenticity Paradox

March 2024

“Hey i need one more set of hands to help with the casket”,

Staring at my nephew now in his mid-twenties, he just slowly shook his head and turned white as the holy ghosts that were setting up a divinity workshop in the Catholic Church that my parents had been attending for the last 15 plus years.

“Paul, I got you”, said my niece’s husband quickly jumping in. Momo is half -Japanese, half-Chinese, which is rare, weighs a buck fifty soaking wet, gets rip roaring hammered off two bottles of Peroni beer, and has a heart of gold.

After hoisting the walnut wood casket from the hearse to the church vestibule I kept thinking about the saw mill my father worked at before becoming a General Motor’s lifer. He would have liked the walnut finish we picked for him. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Feeling a tap on my shoulder, “Hey Uncle Paul, you know I couldn’t really help with the casket because I am coming out as Trans today. I just need to be my authentic self ya know?”.

“yeah? don’t we all, right now i am just focused giving your grandfather a proper burial.” I responded coldly. For the sake of decorum, I kept my shit together and had to repress everything I was feeling that day and in that moment which was still very much unclear.

Mind you my nephew (now niece) is built like a Big Ten Linebacker although the snug black lace shirt, nails, haircut, and earrings are attempting to write another story.

My memory of that day is cloudy like the early March sky that was hovering over us just outside Baltimore but moments like this unfortunately stand out when I don’t want them to. This isn’t a tirade or a narrative I am trying to weave together. This isn’t a cultural indictment but if it comes across that way so be it.

I love my nephew (now niece) very much. Her father passed by a very young age which prompted my dad to retire early and move closer to her to help with her comeuppance in the world. My Dad became a Scout master for her then boy scout troop, escorted countless weekend trips, meetings, projects, all the way up to Senior year of high school for Eagle Scout. My dad was right there with his then grandson. He employed & empowered her to do countless projects around my parent’s house in Baltimore. These were the things my siblings & I grew up doing, if we weren’t working, we got our asses kicked to the curb.

But in the end we make choices and the best way for my nephew (now niece) to honor her grandfather would to be her "Authentic Self”. She worshiped herself when she should have been honoring my father.

How do you describe a feeling? There are times that I can’t do it and this qualifies and my attempts to feel anything about this day roughly over a year ago now come up short or they become masked in anger or contempt or something along the lines of jaded. Perhaps I misgendered my nephew (now niece) by asking for help with my dad’s casket and for that I deem myself remorseful. I was in a jam and needed assistance. I had understood that my niece had been going through some changes for some time, that was the extent of it. It was never my intent to make a mockery of the situation.

I can’t speak to younger people or older people or people my age and refuse to but actions are consequential. I don’t have room in my life for losers. I have already played that hand when I was young and had the whole world in front of me. I’ve played the part of a loser and guess what - it shakes out exactly as intended but I was too blind to see it. When I don’t hold myself accountable-that’s a sure-fire way to become a loser again.

We’re in a existential race for attention and projecting our authenticity as if it’s the last currency on earth we can use. We are high on our own supply. It’s the currency we trade in our souls for and bet high stakes on. We have thrown qualities like maturity, integrity, and selflessness out the window because this is our moment. This is our time to be victims and get showered with micro bits of online therapy, justification for conventional drug use, quiet quitting our jobs with no back up plan, saddling ourselves with debt like its blood on the street but we’re no more worried than the janitor staying employed mopping it up.

We’re so fully involved with ourselves that we can’t even stop honoring an 84-year-old father and grandfather for a day and all that he stood for. We can’t just stop the insignificant musing of our own disenchanted world view and reflect. Maybe attention and authenticity are the new religion. We have stopped going to actual church as the physical place of worship and have instead turned everything inward. We worship ourselves now. Our mimetic tendencies bear this out every day.

This so-called collective sickness is reductive and not complex because we can’t embrace the paradox within ourselves and deal with it like adults anymore. We need to slap a label on our affliction and put a bow on it. We expect everyone around us to take the same page out of the book and when they don’t, they’re cast out.

My father was part of the Silent Generation and always had this resolute intense look about him. Underneath he was a gentle man, loved to laugh, pull off pranks, enjoy a good pipe, and would always back up his word with action. Humbleness came to him naturally and what you saw is exactly what you got. He was an individual who kept his own council and would only fight once it was time to fight.

The following month, St. Pius Catholic Church in Towson, MD. had announced it would be closing its doors. My father’s funeral was one of the last big services there. It’s no secret that church attendance has dropped dramatically in the last decade. For better or worse, my parents were devout Catholics, but it wasn’t lost on them that their children may abandon the church. They knew of all the shortcomings. I may of started in church stuck in the pews with my navy-blue blazer and K-mart Corduroys staring at the stained class murals contemplating everything under the sun but ended up leaving and not replacing it with anything. I’m still searching. I can’t replace something as sovereign as religion with anything that nature provides us with because what nature offers up to us is chaos. Our hellbent intentions and desires to be authentic won’t fill this void. But for all the church’s faults - the one thing that we could always bank on was the notion that there is a world that exists beyond on own heads.

Sometimes perspective is everything and contemplation shouldn’t fall prey to our inner wolves.

Rest easy General.