Authenticity

How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person?

                                 ― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"How much of my brain is willfully my own?"

This question, posed by Sylvia Plath, is not just the pondering of a poet—it is the ache of every thinking soul.

We often assume that the voice inside our head is purely ours. That our beliefs, our choices, our thoughts are authentic expressions of an independent self. But pause, just briefly, and ask: How much of what I think has been planted there?

We are shaped—by books, by parents, by teachers, by the media, by stray conversations on a bus. Words settle into our minds like seeds, and without even knowing, they bloom into thoughts we mistake as our own. We are made of stories told by others. We absorb language, ideas, values. Even rebellion often mirrors the very authority it resists.

Sylvia Plath asks again—How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived?

Are we merely stamping impressions we've gathered, pressing them down on a new page and calling it thought?

Perhaps what distinguishes one person from another is not originality in the purest sense, but the unique synthesis of influence. We are curators, collecting fragments of the world, assembling them into mosaics. No two mosaics are exactly alike, but all are built from the same glass.

And yet, there is something hopeful in this: the awareness itself. The moment we question the source of our thoughts; we begin to reclaim them. Maybe authenticity is not a starting point, but a process. Not something we're born with, but something we wrestle toward peeling away layers, discarding what no longer fits, choosing deliberately what we want to carry forward.

So, we keep asking:

What is truly mine?

What do I think when no one is watching, and no one is listening?

Because somewhere in the echo of all we’ve absorbed, there might still be a voice that is unmistakably our own—quiet, but real.

And maybe, just maybe, that voice is enough.