A significant source of inspiration for my search for authenticity was Thomas Merton, the brilliant monk who claimed to be a recluse while writing several letters a month to people. I loved his writing and books.

He felt authenticity was going inside and facing the reality of one’s self, not papering it up with ambitions, images, or other people’s ideas. This is what I set out to do. From my very biased perch, I feel like I’m getting there, learning to be more comfortable about who I am and learning to live with it and accept it

One thing Merton said about authenticity was this: “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone. We find it with another.” Boy, was he right.

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A letter to me one recent morning:

“Jon, you are not being the “usual” kind of grandfather has been a continuous theme.
No comment, judgment, or snideness. I’ve noticed that over the years.”

I got this interesting email from a long-time reader, and it got me thinking, as messages often do.

The writer was coy and careful to assure me she wasn’t being snide or judgmental (when people say that, they usually are snide or judgmental, or it wouldn’t be on their minds). Still, she forgot why she was asking, or my frequent writing on the subject wasn’t good enough or clear enough.

What, exactly, did she want from me?

Why isn’t it enough if I’ve talked about it for years? It’s a personal thing I didn’t want to share with the world, but it revealed an essential part of me that is the very meaning of authenticity.

I don’t have enough time to answer mysterious questions like that (honestly, I do work for a living), but this one got me thinking about my eventual reply to her:  I said I wrote about that subject because it was the truth. In my mind, I really couldn’t be clearer about it.

I wondered why she didn’t trust me to say what I meant. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines authenticity as being “real or genuine, not copied or false,” like many politicians and Facebook families.

I am sometimes overwhelmed and, at other times, puzzled by people who ask me for more information than I am often interested in answering. But that doesn’t mean the questions are inappropriate. My inspiration for my blog,  E.B. White, who wrote his Running to the Country column, “One Man’s Meat,” was my role model.

I’m grumpy sometimes, but he always got ticked off when someone asked him to answer questions that took some work and time and annoyed him: “There are 10,000 of you,” he wrote, “but only one of me.” Guess what, E.B., there would be millions of them now, and still only one of you or me. Put that in your cap.

I know what he meant. People often ask me personal questions I don’t want to answer, things I wrote about that they missed, how Zip the cat is doing (I write about him just about once every day), or messages like the one above, which seemed frightened that I might explode.

I wondered if the woman asking about my granddaughter thought I was lying or didn’t believe I had told the whole story. So, I wondered if my answer— that I wrote about it because it was the truth—was enough for her. Did she smell blood and want to know more?

What does it mean to be authentic?

And then that got me further: Was I being honest? I make an effort to be truthful on my blog. I am proud that it was one of the first blogs I knew of where someone told the hard truth about himself rather than trying to sell something or make me look better than I was.

I believe now that an authentic person is true to their personality, values, and beliefs, living in harmony with their inherent self, acting according to their true nature rather than trying to please others, like, for example, the hordes of media critics and yentas on social media

I’ve stumbled now and then, but mostly, I held to my promise to be authentic, which meant I had to learn to be genuine. It was one thing to say that, another to be it, and years of therapy, meditation, intense reading, abandoning my life, and leaving my life behind helped. It was not easy.

It was the most difficult time of my life.

My struggle to be authentic was affected by my meeting Maria, whose life gave me good reason and motivation to be honest and forthcoming. My relationship with her—the first person I ever loved in that way—helped me find the meaning of life and my authenticity.

Love means caring for someone else more than myself, Maria. I’m not sure I’ve ever done this before.

Because she is honest and forthcoming, I have no choice but to examine myself closely and see what I find. Otherwise, we would never be together.

I don’t think searching for my identity is always necessary, but it was required. I looked in the mirror and found a lot to change, and I have changed a lot.

No one I know is authentic, including Merton, a devout Trappist Monk, who nearly ran off with a nurse he met at a Kentucky Hospital.

I created a fantasy place to study who I was and what I didn’t like about myself. I called it the “secret country,” a place of loneliness, a place Merton wrote about:  ” a country of loneliness and of a kind of hunger, of silence, of perplexity, of waiting, of strange hopes: where men expect the impossible to be born but do not always dare to speak of their hopes.”

It’s a place I went to every day for nearly six years until it broke down entirely and finally gave me the chance to muster the courage to change.

On the surface, I am often confused about what being authentic means. I have my ideas.

It means I must be honest about the good and the bad. I think that social media – places like Facebook – have degenerated into places where people can claim to be happier and better than they are. I am constantly telling people what is wrong with me, yet I was shocked by how many people thank me for having these mental issues. I know I’m crazy in many ways, but I’ve come to be proud of that.

I see very little truth on Facebook or most social media sites.

This is an issue for anyone writing about himself or herself in the very open world of social media. You find your boundaries, or get nibbled to death. You find out who you are pretty soon.

I’ve been working on being comfortable with myself, no matter anyone else’s thoughts. I don’t want to be one of those bloggers or writers who wall themselves off from their readers. I get a lot from interacting with people, good or bad. This is about how I learned to live comfortably with myself.

On a deeper level, I had a real aversion to conflict. It’s tricky to feel peaceful when hundreds of thousands of people read your blog weekly. You can be sure many of them don’t like what they read.

Being honest makes lots of people uncomfortable, not least of all me.band I do invite thoughtful comment.

In the greatest depths, like a spring of pure water rising in the flames of hell, there is always the smallness, the frailty of a hope that is never overwhelmed but continues strangely and inexplicably to nourish in apparent despair.

That never goes away, nor should it. It keeps me very humble. Such is life in the Secret Country, an emotional home for me..

Merton became my guide to meditation and self-examination. Like me, he found many things about himself he didn’t like, and hopefully, like me, he changed, acknowledged, and confessed his flaws, which was realistic and honest. He’s my role model.

Could you tell me what this has to do with my granddaughter? Nothing, I don’t see that as anybody else’s business, or something I want to write about more than I had. Over this past work, I’ve learned that being authentic doesn’t mean I have to discuss or reveal every level of my personal life.

It’s quite the opposite. It has made me comfortable telling people like the woman above that honesty doesn’t mean giving my love to anyone else. When I said I wasn’t cut out to be the super granddad I keep reading about on social media, I was being honest.

That’s a big deal for me, and tells me I am learning what authenticity means. Being authentic is knowing what you want and don’t say. Sharing my life is not renting it to others. I don’t blame that woman for asking me. I am happy I know how to say it now.

Being authentic is working to know who you are and liking it.