"Waiting for your REAL life to change?"

One of my dear friends -- a fellow journalist, blogger and parent -- is Pam Cytrynbaum, an instructor in the New Media Communications Department at Oregon State University.

We've shared so many conversations over the years about the profession we love, about the students she's taught and I've interviewed and/or spoken to as a guest speaker in her classes at OSU and, previously, at the University of Oregon. We've shared moments of insight and mutual encouragement and -- always -- a good belly laugh over something or other.

So it's with much respect and great enthusiasm that I recommend this piece of hers, written as a blogger for Psychology Today. It's about "the artifice of the 'realness' impulse" -- in other words, it's about the identity crisis that we all experience in one way another, turning our insecurities into self-doubt. Pam offers her take with great honesty and passion. An excerpt:

What is that, exactly, that thing where you're so deeply who you are? Authenticity? True selfhood? Empathy -- given and received simultaneously?

At the core, it feels like this:

I'm being who I am, not who I think they want me to be or who I think I'm expected to be. I am saying what I think. I am responding honestly and being fully present. I feel genuine. My feelings feel genuine. As we talk, as I teach, as I listen, as I write, as we are together in whatever way, it is genuine. It is an electrical charge connecting us. Is it empathy? Is it simply being understood, heard and known? What is it made of? I don't know. But I know when it begins and can feel precisely when it breaks and disconnects. It feels like the only thing that is real.