Here is a test that is useful and thoroughly uncomfortable. Take something you are proud of, or working towards, and remove one single element from it. Not the thing itself, which stays exactly as it is. Only the possibility that anybody will ever know about it. Nobody will find out, now or later, ever.
Now check whether it is still wanted. Some things survive this immediately and completely and there is no need to think. Others go so quickly that they can be felt going, and what is left afterwards is the slightly embarrassing knowledge that the wanting was never really about the thing at all.
Run this test across a whole life, thoroughly, over the course of a few weeks, and it is not a good few weeks. It is not recommended all at once. But what it shows cannot be unlearned, and a good deal of what follows in a life follows from it.
The audience is not always anybody real
The obvious form of this is doing something in order to impress people. That is easy enough to spot and most of us can see it in ourselves at least occasionally, and are appropriately embarrassed for an afternoon before carrying on.
The more common form is much subtler. The audience is not a specific person and very often does not exist at all. It is a general sense of being observed, of a record being kept somewhere, of a standing that could be raised or lowered by what happens next. Nobody in particular is watching, and everything is nevertheless arranged as though somebody is.
Sometimes the audience is one person from long ago. A parent who has been dead for years. A group of children who decided something when everybody was nine and have not thought about it since. Whole decades get built to answer people who are not there and who would be genuinely baffled to learn what they had set in motion.
What is left when it goes
The reason the test is uncomfortable is that it does not merely reveal vanity, which would be manageable. It reveals how little anybody actually knows about their own preferences, because most of them have never once been tested in private.
Take away the watching and a great many things become unclear very quickly. Would this work still be wanted if nobody ever saw it? Would this standard be kept if nobody could possibly tell the difference? Would most of what gets done still get done? For a large part of a life these cannot be answered, because there has never been a version of the question that did not include an audience somewhere in it.
Some things do survive, and those are the interesting ones. They are smaller than expected and considerably less impressive, and they would not have been named if somebody had asked for a list of what matters. They are quiet things, mostly done alone, mostly with nothing at all to show at the end of them.
What it actually asks
Living in your own truth is usually described as though it were a matter of courage, of standing up somewhere and declaring something in front of people. Sometimes it is. Mostly it is very much less dramatic than that and considerably harder to sustain.
It is a long series of small choices in which somebody does the thing that is actually theirs rather than the thing that will be understood by everybody. Nobody applauds these, because nobody sees them, which is the entire point of them. And they have to be made without confirmation, sometimes for years, with a persistent low doubt about whether this is simply being difficult for the sake of it.
There is a cost and it should not be pretended away. People do not always follow somebody into a life they cannot read. Some of them drift away, and it is a real loss, and it should be counted. But the alternative is a life that everybody can read easily and that belongs to nobody, and that one is a very well-attended kind of emptiness.
