Announce your authenticity louder; the rest of us can still hear the derivative little engine underneath.

The tragedy of your authenticity is that it is entirely manufactured, and not even manufactured well. You have assembled a personality from the scraps of other people's phrases, other people's causes, other people's haircuts, then announced it to the room as though it were a private revelation. It is not. It is a knockoff, and a rather obvious one at that. You call it being true to yourself because the alternative is admitting you have nothing original to be true to. So you turn up the volume. You speak in bold declarations, you use the word journey without irony, you post the unflattering photograph and call it brave. The rest of us hear the derivative little engine underneath, chugging away at a script somebody else wrote. The line lands best when you are midway through explaining that you are simply not like the others, or when you deliver a monologue about your values and someone notices they are the same values from a greetings card. Authenticity is not a volume knob. It is a substance, and you are still waiting for yours to arrive.