Lessons on Being Authentic From the Breakfast Club

Dear Jane,
I am the consummate chameleon. When I'm with one group of friends, I'm a partier. With my church friends, I'm quieter. Who am I really?

Have you ever tried to look better on the outside than you were feeling on the inside? Do you ever abandon your truth to please others? If you weren’t afraid of risking losing someone’s approval, acceptance, or love, if you didn’t feel that you had to choose between abandoning yourself or being abandoned by someone else, wouldn’t you be authentic all the time with everyone? Wouldn’t you stand up for yourself more?

Whenever I am challenged to please others at the expense of being real, I think about Anais Nin’s eloquent quote, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” It is painful to hold ourselves back. At some point, we stop thriving and begin living in endurance when we believe we have to maintain an act.

When in an act, we behave incongruently with what we really feel. Whatever our reasons and fears of being authentic—hurt, ridicule, abandonment—the problem is that after we have our act for a while, we can’t remember who we were without it. And if we can’t figure out who we are, how are others going to really know us? How can we have intimacy if we are not authentic? We sacrifice intimacy for acceptance and wonder why our relationships feel tepid or dry.

In my book, Enough Is Enough!, I refer to the now-classic film, The Breakfast Club, to look at the consequences of maintaining an act and the liberation of dropping it. In the film, five high school students are given detention for various infractions against the rules. They are to remain in the school library all Saturday with the task of completing one assignment: Each of them is to write a thousand-word essay describing who they think they are. Because the assignment seems silly and boring to most of them, they begin instead to try to figure out who the others in the room are.

At first, they buy each other’s act: the jock, the brain, the crazy one, the prom queen, the criminal. They cling to their own acts too, uncomfortably comfortable with their labels. But as they are forced to spend many hours together, their real selves peek through, and each of them starts to chafe against the restrictions of his or her image.

As they break out of their molds, their false sense of security and identity are shaken, but they ultimately come to respect themselves and each other. By the end of the day, they decide to write only one essay among them, conveying that the adults in their lives see them only as they want to see them, in the most limited of ways, which is how they saw themselves that very morning before spending the day together. They write that what they learned is that each of them has attributes of the others within themselves. They are all capable of being smart, athletic, crazy, elitist, or rebellious. They are all of these things and yet they are so much more.

They leave detention as comrades, having learned something crucial: judgments are real but they are never the truth. They have also come to see that their self-judgments are the most restrictive of all, forcing them to behave in ways that limited them and fed their fear of others.

The Breakfast Club reminds us that molding ourselves into the image of what others want and expect diminishes our spirit and dramatizes the value of discovering who we are beneath our acts.

It takes courage to be authentic in every moment. But who we really are is much more interesting than any character we could possibly play. And thriving is really much more interesting than simply surviving, isn’t it?