Wysiwyg or Living an Authentic Life

Last updated on: October 25, 2026 at 2:38 pm by Rob Giannamore

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Wysiwyg or Living an Authentic Life 2026-10-25T14:38:50-04:00 Rob Giannamore

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The Question of Authenticity

I was thinking recently about the phrase “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG), and it led me to think about authenticity. WYSIWYG can be used poorly and it can become an oversimplification and an excuse for bad behavior. But when we drill down to exploring our true selves and embracing our true selves, WYSIWYG becomes so much more – it becomes the moment we become honest with who we are and who we are God’s eyes. We are God’s beloved and our quirks, our smirks and and our personalities are to embraced and sometimes recognized to be mislplaced and harmful to the people around us. Here then we engage in the process of becoming to embrace our Christ nature and our belovedness.

The Cost of Living as a False Self

In mental health, when who a person experiences themselves to be conflicts with how they feel or behave, we describe the experience as ego-dystonic. When we suppress our true selves or perform a false self to fit in, that inner conflict can contribute to anxiety, depression, and an existential crisis: the realization that the person we have tried to become is not who we truly are.

I want to demonstrate three practices that we can utilize to help us bring our true self back into alignment. This will at times be a difficult process and one that I have observed many times with my clients over the years. Often, casting off our false self means adjusting our relationships with the cultures – family, religion, work, relationship and nationality that we have grown into over the course of our lives.

Often times, and for me in particular, we begin to feel things are amiss somewhere in our our late twenties and early thirties as we notice that something is off. For me, it was a feeling of dis ease, it was when I got my first tattoo and it was interestingly when I returned heavily to my monastic and contemplative roots. These moments can happen throughout the lifespan though and is different for every person. For me, the change was healthy, but for many whom I sit with daily, substances are involved, mental health gets worse and relationships disintegrate – finding your authentic self can be very disruptive.

Fortunately, there are practices that can help us recenter.

Questing and the Self in the Process of Becoming

The practice of questing helps us live more authentically because it reminds us that identity is not static. We are always becoming, and the questions we pursue can guide the course of our lives. Questing is a process of becoming that enhances our adventure of life and encourages risk taking. It balances feelings of timidity and counters feelings of certitude – clinging is the source of suffering and clinging to a should or a certainty or even a false identify sours the experience of life.

We must always reflect on the process of questing with questions of curiosity – “why?”, “ I wonder?” and “what happens next?”

Meeting and Reclaiming the Shadow

Our shadow self can illuminate who we truly are because it holds the qualities, desires, wounds, and strengths we have learned to hide. Reclaiming these parts can feel frightening because doing so may disrupt an identity that once helped us feel safe or accepted. By examining our shadow, we begin to enhance our wholeness. We begin to see the duality that we all possess – observing the good parts of us and the not so nice parts of us. We begin to learn how to hold them both but not cling each other.

Shadow work, “in analytical psychology, the shadow is an unconscious aspect of the personality that does not correspond with the ego ideal, leading the ego to resist and project the shadow, creating conflict with it. The shadow may be personified as archetypes which relate to the collective unconscious, such as the trickster.”

Essentially, shadow represents everything we don’t see in our lives. It is the part of us that hides in the darkness, just over our shoulders, always there, but always out of reach. We are so afraid of the darkness that we never stare long enough to see it. When are compassionate to the the shadow rather than fight it or run from it, we are led to greater authenticity, internal strength, creativity, increased energy, and a more profound sense of awakening.

The Spiritual Practice of You

Authenticity can become a spiritual practice when we learn to attend to our experience without immediately judging, hiding, or reshaping it for others. As you cultivate a stronger sense and embrace of your true and authentic self, there are practices to help us along the way. As a life long contemplative, a daily practice of prayer, creativity and honest conversation with myself and those around me have been tools to keep me centered.

One of my most important phrases I use every day to guide my steps is “your words God, not mine” and at the end of the day, I reflect on the way I walked this path with an Examen.

We can ground authentic in relationality with others when it is grounded not only in self knowledge, but also in love, humility and responsibility. We need others in our space because authenticity is found not in isolation, but often in community with others and dialogue with God. We are shaped by our openness to redirection in these spaces and because of this, the ongoing practice of humility is needed to guide us. In this process, we become honest (brutally at times) about our gifts, our wounds, our needs and our limitations so that we can enter relationships without hiding behind performance or demanding that others affirm a carefully constructed identity.

When we practice the examen, our question at the end of the day must be “Did the way I lived today help me love others more faithfully?” When our self-expression consistently harms, diminishes, or ignores the people around us, it may be self-absorption rather than freedom – this is the toxic side of wysiwyg. Authentic living deepens our capacity to listen, apologize, set compassionate boundaries, and make room for another person’s truth. This the growth side of wysiwyg. As we grow and we lean into this healthier embrasure of self, we find that becoming more fully ourselves is not a retreat from relationship; it is what allows us to meet others with greater presence, courage, and love.

To Close – Letting Your Life Speak

I am at at retreat today with my Benedictine sisters and we are talking about slowing down. When we slow down, and we sit and listen, we can hear our life speak. Listening to our life speak lets us listen for what remains true beneath performance, fear, and expectation. When we choose authenticity, we are not starting with a finished life that has a finished identity. Instead, when we choose authenticity, we begin to notice what life gives us and welcome back what we have hidden and cast off to be part of the crowd, to keep us with the Jone’s. When we live an authentic life, we let our choices increasingly reflect what we discover.

The phrase WYSIWYG can be used two ways. It can be dismissive and a way of saying “this is just who I am, take it or leave it”. But it can also be a phrase of acceptance and a declaration of authenticity. When WYSIWYG says “I am human” and “I am a child of God” and we begin to embody and accept this, we begin to live into our authentic selves.

I bring this blog to a close with this question, “what might your life be trying to tell you – and what would you change if you listened?

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