Think Twice Before Bringing Your ‘Real Self’ to Work Employers increasingly ask us for authenticity in the workplace — but is anyone actually ready for it? When your employer asks for your “real self,” I bet they didn’t factor in the Orange Mocha Frappuccinos Norm Macdonald, my favorite-ever comedian, noticed a troubling trend on the stand-up circuit before he passed away: the rise of “confessional comedy.” He argued that newer comics were more interested in the act of sharing raw, ragged, cringeworthy, look-how-brave-I-am anecdotes with audiences than the classic, careful craft of writing a joke. In Norm’s eyes, they weren’t really comedians so much as performers who pushed their painful pasts out onto the stage, watching those stories spread like artful grease fires before, finally, shamelessly expecting applause for the effort. But Norm hadn’t identified a trend that was specific to stand-up comedy; instead, he’d zeroed in on a symptom of a much larger issue — one that continues to quietly and irrevocably reshape the “pre-post COVID” workplace as we know it. Now, more than ever, employers increasingly encourage (if not expect) their employees to bring their “true self” to the job. No more walls between the couch and the cubicle. Honesty always. “Transparency” is an HR buzzword that’s caught fire in recent years, too. You’ve undoubtedly come across it at your own place of work, folded into everything from onboarding materials to employee engagement emails. In fact, here are a few very real taglines released by a few very well-known companies, which are all shades of the same misguided idea: Let’s get real here. Feel free to be free. Don’t think of this as an office — think of it as a second home. You do you. These are certainly a far cry from the “I don’t care what you do on your own time…” line I’ve occasionally doled out to my own people. They’re also a zillion light years beyond the “Stop crying and just do your job” drumbeat of our parents’ generation. It marks a sea change that’s both suspiciously sudden and strangely sympathetic, challenging not only what we should bring to our jobs, but who we should bring. That’s why Norm Macdonald’s skepticism toward confessional comedy echoes my own concerns about this new feelings-friendly posture that corporations across the globe continue to adopt. Here’s a little bit of Norm getting real: “I saw a one-woman show once and she goes, ‘Well, my mother had breast cancer and now I have breast cancer.’ And I’m like… well, that’s everybody. They think it’s so special when everyone gets cancer and dies. It’s the height of narcissism to think that just because you have cancer, you’re brave. How is that brave? It seems cowardly to me.” This is a sentiment that’s stuck with me longer than any of Norm’s best jokes. From the family Thanksgiving dinner table to the endless high school reunion of Facebook, we expect an impossible level of transparency from everyone, no matter what, wherever we go, 24/7. With employers purportedly wanting the same thing, our emotional well-being has a currency that it’s never had. “Back in the day,” when you just needed some time for yourself, you’d call in sick to work and then quietly checkmark a “mental health day” for yourself. Today, companies have “Mental Health Day” listed as an official option on employee timesheets. While I appreciate it on a surface level, I can’t help but feel like we’re somehow drifting away from professional integrity and toward murkier workplace waters. I sometimes wonder what my grandfather (an engineer and mathematician who spent his entire career with General Motors) would think if he had to tangle with today’s emotional minefield. The answer amuses me as much as it unsettles me. Authenticity is something that virtually employer claims to want, but seem ill-equipped to receive. More than that, should they even be asking for it in the first place…? Whenever an employee is encouraged to bring their “true self” to work and they actually do, you’ll find that the word “brave” suddenly gets thrown around like confetti. I know this for a fact because I’m one of those employees who went all-in with their “Here’s the real me!” poker chips. (I’ll come back to this.) What I discovered is that being authentic isn’t brave at all — especially when you find countless colleagues doing the exact same thing at the same time due to a corporate directive. Still, studies like this one suggest that openness in the workplace leads to a “richer, more authentic product,” while others indicate that it leads to low turnover rates and better bottom lines. Those seem like easy answers, though, like how the simple act of asking for the “real you” might give some Fortune 500 behemoth the illusion of a pulse. I think it’s more than that, and maybe far more complex than anyone (including the average HR department) has really considered. Think about it for a second. Like, really think about it. At best, even if your employer’s motives are genuine and well-intentioned, they run the real risk of not knowing what they don’t know when it comes to what they’re asking. At worst…? Well, what if this whole “Be you” rhetoric is a coldly calculated move — one that’s designed to draw out your insecurities, faults, struggles and secrets to serve their interests while leaving you weak and wondering how things went so wrong…?
Oh, right. Sorry, I forgot. This the part where I’m supposed to tell you that I’m a recovering alcoholic. Before finding sobriety, I was as alcoholic as alcoholics get, too. It wasn’t easy to get to this side of the coin, but I’m here. <Cue undeserved applause.> Not that long ago, my main skill in life was hiding wine bottles around the house in ridiculously obvious, first-place-you’d-look places. In other words, I’m not some soaring stock when it comes to recovery. I’ve had so many fits and starts with sobriety that a transcript would resemble the results of a lie-detector test. Endless peaks and valleys; scribbled arcs of ink. Sober. Not Sober. Sober. Sober. Kinda Sober. Not Sober. Hospital. Sober! Definitely Not Sober. Shakily Sober… But for as long as I can remember, it was an unspoken fact that you didn’t bring your personal life to work — especially if you’re an addict in recovery. Home life was home life, work was work, and that was that. For a decade, I worked for JPMorgan Chase which, if you know nothing about finance in all the same ways that I know nothing about sports, is one of the world’s largest banks. At one point while I worked there, my home life was a horror show. Divorce. A dementia diagnosis for my father (who then died shortly after). Chapter 7 bankruptcy. And then some more of life’s greatest hits. Imagine your life as if it’s a TV show. Now, let’s say that this TV show has been written, season after high-quality season, by someone like Aaron Sorkin — the guy who created The West Wing. Great, right? Well, not so fast. Imagine now that Sorkin suddenly vanishes without a trace at the start of Season 7 and without any warning, your show lands in the hands of … 1980s comedian Gallagher. That’s right. Gallagher. Overnight, you’ve gone from West Wing to watermelons — and you have to pretend that nothing has changed. That’s the sort of workforce that I entered into back in the 90s but for better or for worse, it is all but unrecognizable from today’s. Until recently, I’ll bet I’m not alone in feeling like I deserved an Academy Award nomination for the day-to-day performance I gave at work as a person without a care or concern in the world. At JPMC, I couldn’t have asked for a more supportive, caring firm full of understanding managers and a seemingly infinite amount of mental health resources. Emotions encouraged; tears accepted. By the way, this isn’t a paid advertisement for JPMorgan. This is because “night and day” doesn’t begin to describe how different JPMC is now from when I started. During my first week on the job, around the time when the housing market collapsed, JPMC’s charmingly brash CEO Jamie Dimon was scheduled to visit our office in Columbus, Ohio. (Sadly, it wasn’t in honor of my first week there.) Anyway, Mr. Dimon always came across as this perpetually prepared, sharply-dressed, well-bodyguarded, silver-haired billionaire who enjoyed peppering profanity throughout his speeches like some Southwestern celebrity chef who just can’t be stopped with the jalapenos. All I know is the hourlong “town hall” was a massive deal for everyone around me. That building’s interior walls were scrubbed clean by people on scaffolds while the outside was blasted with high-pressure water. Colorful plants suddenly lined the walkways, thanks to ninja gardeners we never saw. Floors were polished with precision. Emails circulated nonstop about how to correctly wear neckties and jackets, not to mention proper skirt lengths. (Just believe me when I tell you this email was important for way too many people. I’m looking at you, Call Center Woman Who Loves Pajama Pants.) Anyway, the event was crammed into a cafeteria area that still smelled like sauerkraut from the St. Patrick’s Day special. It was standing room only and I was near the back, watching Dimon do his thing all the while thinking just how happy I was to have a job. When the questions shifted from “Why is our cafeteria food so bad?” to “Can our cafeteria food get better?” to “Have you had our cafeteria food here?”, I was happy to finally hear a real question. “What advice would you give someone just entering the workforce?” Dimon thought about this for a couple of beats and I’ll never, ever forget his response: “In the real world, no one cares how you feel.” This is something he would repeat in many interviews and company intranet articles over the next few years. But if cornered, I doubt anyone at the bank (Dimon included) would admit that he ever said it. More than that, I seriously doubt anyone would agree with the 2008 version of him… …but I do. When it comes right down to it, no one really, actually, genuinely 100% cares how you feel at work. After all: even you don’t. If you feel like you do, then you might be one of those Daniel Day-Lewis method actors who’ve stayed in character way too long between takes, carrying the charade too far and forgetting you’re in a movie. Now, look: I’m not saying you don’t care about your current colleagues’ feelings — I’m just saying that it’s a proximity-based kind of caring, limiting your co-workers to a limited emotional radius. For example, there is only so much energy available on the planet, which is why you’ll never see two hurricanes occurring at the same time. Same thing is true about feelings at work. There is only so much emotional capital you can spend on people. If you care about everyone, you’re actually caring about no one. (I’ll circle back to this point.) And this is what makes the contemporary corporate world so fascinating to me. Virtually every major company out there has a very public investment in the emotional well-being of its people. We’re living in an age of empathy theater. We’re all cast in elaborate productions where our characters are written to behave and react in heightened, hyper-aware, super-empathetic ways. In the past, I’ve worked with some managers who’ve had the personality of a dialtone or the emotional range of a Daisy air rifle. Thinking back on them now, there’s something almost endearing about them. The greatest irony of the “We want to know who you really are” push is that for all its talk of authenticity, the motives behind it are perhaps everything but authentic.
“You should be able to talk about anything at a moment’s notice,” some high-level communications expert was saying via this giant telepresence screen. It was a professional development seminar and it was focused on public speaking. “You should be able to talk about anything — anything — for three minutes, unprompted.” Two things here: I remember these exact words very, very clearly — if only because he took comically long pauses between every one of them. You could drive three cars between them. Maybe he was telling me that I’d be forced to suddenly discuss R.E.M.’s discography and argue that 1996’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi is their best album. (It is. Don’t argue with me.) Anyway, there I was, sitting alone in this huge telepresence room after I’d been promoted into a role where all of my colleagues were located at completely different sites across the country. Dozens and dozens of rooms like mine were collected into this checkerboard of ravioli-sized tiles on the screen, with the names of our locations listed below each tile. Texas. Florida. Delaware. Illinois. I sat at the end of this long table with empty chairs on both sides. I’d chosen a seat near the back of the room, hoping to make my appearance smaller so I’d make it through the meeting unnoticed. “You shouldn’t ever be caught off-guard,” he continued. “Always have something practiced to say. If you don’t practice in private, you’ll fail in public.” Then, as fate would have it, he started choosing location names at random from the giant screen of tiled faces. Some poor woman from Lewisville, Texas (“Third lady to the left, green blouse in Lewisville” was her name) was caught unaware and spent a few minutes nervously talking about how to prepare for a wedding. And then: “Columbus, Ohio. Let’s go with you.” A lightning bolt of adrenaline surged through my body. “Me?” “You’re all of Columbus, Ohio. Yes.” As mild laughter rippled across the screen, my brain went blank and I said the following: “Hi, I’m Paul — and I’m an alcoholic.” The air suddenly rushed out of that room like someone had thrown open a spacecraft airlock. In fact, I prayed that was the case as hundreds of faces stared back at me, frozen and as uncertain of how to react as me when I’d been called on. Some people laughed, thinking what I’d said was a joke; others saw that I was serious. I very clearly remember a woman near the bottom right-hand corner of the screen wincing. No matter what, this was uncharted territory for everyone. Even the comms expert seemed to snap out of his memorized talking points, regarding me like someone would if they’d managed to catch a real-life Pokémon. I hadn’t just announced this in some basement AA room where I was absently swirling coffee in a styrofoam cup. Nope. I’d just accidentally outed myself as a recovering alcoholic to 200-some people I barely knew. Being open and honest about my sobriety wasn’t something that I’d really given much consideration to. I’d told my family and some friends by this point. But I knew there were people out there who were open about it — brash, even. But my face drained color as I felt my career prospects starting to circle a different drain. People were undoubtedly already texting others along with sidelong glances: “Can you believe what just happened?” This would be the stuff of horrible legend. It’s over for me. I hadn’t meant to reveal the truth. It was just a reflex. It was simply hard-coded into my DNA at the time — especially since I was attending two or three meetings a week. That sentence was currency with other alcoholics and usually earned nods and approving smiles. This time, I got wide-eyed shock. Regardless, I thought of my friend Shawn, whom I’ve known since third grade. We’re both in our forties now and he still rocks a non-ironic mohawk. One of his favorite phrases? “Go big or go home.” That’s exactly what flashed through my brain at the moment as my adrenaline burned off. I’d accidentally gone big and my truth was out. I leaned into it. I shared an abbreviated story about my drinking days from start to finish. In less than three minutes, I articulated as much of it as I could. It was bizarre, too, confessing the ugly details of my alcoholic past to a screen of mostly anonymous people who still somehow had an effect on my day-to-day life. No one whispered; no one looked away. I had their attention. I told them about how I’d once passed out and forgotten to pick up my son from kindergarten; I shared how rehab didn’t work for me the first time and how, two weeks later, I was in a car chugging a tall boy; I revealed how I couldn’t be trusted. I then also told them all how I’d been given a second chance at life through recovery — how it wasn’t so much a second lease on life so much as a first go-around at it. As an alcoholic, I hadn’t made any choices. I hadn’t made any meaningful relationships or any promises that mattered. I hadn’t lived. I even got into how grateful I was that I had a job in the first place. It was like a scorched-earth campaign, with no going back. In that moment, the words just came. Nothing had been rehearsed; no bullet points had been organized. I just talked — and I’d never been that honest in my life. And when it was all over, there was stunned silence. “And with that,” I said, as if I was in a roomful of fellow drunks, “I pass.” The exec appeared on the telepresence screen, cleared his throat, and simply said, “Thanks for your honesty.” And then he moved on, not calling on one more person for the rest of the meeting. I didn’t get a talking-to from my manager. I didn’t lose my job. I didn’t lose my credibility. If nothing else, I gained some semblance of respect from people I didn’t know. A few anonymous cards later arrived on my desk via inter-office mail, thanking me for what I’d said. I was officially “living out loud” now. But it gave me the confidence to become a professional writer on the topic, with over three hundred articles about addiction recovery being published in magazines, books, journals, and websites over the next few years. I’m not bragging — I’m just telling you that I took transparency and ran with it. Was it worth it, though? Sort of. Well, kinda. Actually, not really. But, maybe. You know what…? No. It wasn’t. If I’m being completely honest, I wish I’d kept quiet. If I’d kept my story to myself, perhaps I could’ve focused on the sobriety part of it all more. Instead, when your identity is completely connected to what you accidentally shared at a 3:00 professional development seminar, you can’t ever shake free from it. My decision to be open and honest in the workplace is now carried with me wherever I go. It shadows my LinkedIn profile to the point where I wonder just how many recruiters have had thought, “Nice resume, but too bad this guy is a time bomb,” before moving on. And here’s where it becomes tricky: there really is an overwhelming sense of relief with being yourself in the workplace — especially for a former addict like me who hasn’t exactly been good at being myself. After that moment, I was told to keep telling my story, to continue being this person. So, for me, the true dangers lie in the reactions you can never expect and can never predict. If you want to live out loud at work, ask yourself if your employer has your best interests at heart. Once you tell people who and what you are, that’s who and what you are for the rest of your time at that job. At best, it’s an endless treadmill of making sure you’re living up to someone’s expectations; at worst, it’s like being on on display in a glass jar. Gradually, I became less of an employee than a specimen who appeared in seminars about substance abuse for the company’s EAP program; I gave big speeches for small groups; I sat for internal interviews like this one. I was a go-to cautionary tale, a redemption story, and a recovery poster child conveniently all rolled into one. And with an audience of 250,000 employees, it was both daunting and exhausting to be my “real self” at work all the time. This trend could be traced back to the COVID-ZOOM days, maybe, where we scoured our co-workers’ backgrounds for details of their home lives. (Come on, don’t lie… you totally did it, too.) But whatever the case, collapsing the distance between home and work doesn’t mean you also have to forfeit your identity in the process, either. That’s why Norm had it right. You can’t unload misdeeds on people and expect applause, nor can you scream from the rooftops that you’ve finally found sobriety, sanity or stability. You can’t have your chaos “Mary Poppins’ed” all back into its dresser drawers. We all have That One Friend who only does charitable, noteworthy things so long as it’s conspicuously documented on social media, don’t we? It’s not a good look. For me, being open about recovery isn’t an opportunity to humblebrag about a bold, new direction in life. That’s not something that lasts. There’s a Grand Canyon between “confession” and “confessional,” by the way, but people really don’t know the difference between the two. Sharing your problematic past doesn’t instantly make it a positive present and it certainly doesn’t excuse or erase anything. That’s for damn sure. In other words, there is zero bravery in revealing that you’re an addict or alcoholic. None. There’s bravery in how you’ve admitted the problem and are doing something to move forward, sure, but courage isn’t found in writing about addiction recovery for the world to see — nor revealing it at work. Bravery is found only in how you use your past experiences to quietly and inward live a better life for you and those around you. Ironically, many of the sites I’ve written for have shut down or gone offline in recent months. Many of the magazines where I’ve seen my name in print have gone under, too. One after the other. This means that everything I wrote about my experiences and beyond is evaporating, much like the details of that dream seconds after you wake up. It feels like part of me is dying at the same time that I’m trying to protect the sobriety that I was writing about. Why did I tell anyone I was sober outside of AA, let alone someone who struggled with addiction in the first place? Personally, I think it has to do with the fact that even the most cynical, cold-hearted people among us are good people. In my early twenties, back when I was teaching English 101 to students barely younger than me, my final essay prompt was wide open. They could literally write about anything. I mean, come on: what greater gift to a student is that? You want to write about the fashion sense of senior citizens? Fantastic. The history of dishwashing? Sign me up. The secret life of being a Juggalo? Bring it on. These are Juggalos. You’re welcome. So long as their essay followed the rules that I’d taught them, I figured it didn’t matter. After six semesters, though… it mattered. I couldn’t take it anymore. Without fail, I’d receive at least one or two exhaustively emotional responses from students who wrote about something traumatic, depressing or downright devastating that they’d endured. But those papers were the products of a dangerously lazy writing prompt on my part — in the exact same ways employers keep inviting your “full self” into the workplace. My students were submitting torrential-downpour confessionals —these 12-point, double-spaced grenades thrown over the wall — that provided uncomfortably detailed narratives that were (probably up until then) known only to close family, friends, and/or law enforcement officials. My immediate response? I awarded those papers with a solid A, not to mention using adjectives like “brave” or “courageous” in my comments. (Sound familiar?) Over time, though, things changed because they had to change. I wasn’t colder or more callous — I simply had to ignore what they were saying to focus on how they were saying it. I evaluated all of the things the papers were missing: structure, flow, spelling, style, syntax, reasoning, punctuation. Those papers, I discovered, missed the mark just like I had when I awarded an A to one of them. It’s human nature to get distracted with empathy for someone’s situation as much as it is to praise an otherwise hollow piece of writing. In the past, when I’ve helped a student or a friend talk through something difficult, I’m never quite ready for the result — even if I see it coming from parsecs away. But it’s my instinct to overcompensate and I suspect that’s how companies react when we bring “my authentic me” to the office. I wonder just how many millions of dollars have been spent by companies hurriedly trying to build support structures after authenticity is in the door. Where many employees see brand-new counseling programs and support services, I’m sure others see difficult discussions and dollar signs spreading like bacteria across their budgets and org charts. As an instructor, the question for me was this: “Am I giving a C+ to a student’s paper, or am I giving a C+ to that student’s experience?” It’s as thorny as much as it’s preventable. What I’m saying is there’s no joy in me giving a C+ grade to a student’s raw piece of writing. Even when I sharpened my end-of-year writing prompt, I thought I’d be better able to filter those confessionals about repression, rape or racism. As it turns out, whenever I invited even the smallest part of someone’s authenticity into the room — as a college instructor in the classroom or a manager in an office — the damage will always emerge in another way. The chair of our English department, for example, strongly suggested that I “maybe go easy” the next time around with the students who wrote sensitive replies to my new, narrower prompt. After some complaints from these undergrads’ parents that their freshmen kids needed counseling because of the C or C+ they deserved, I was asked to dial future grades to a, say, B-. My chair’s exact suggestion was: “Just keep these kids above sea level, okay? They’re pouring their hearts out here.” And so, I pulled my punches. I was false and inauthentic all while grading genuine, real stories riddled with typos. Truth is a lot like water in that way: the more you try to contain it, the more that it does untold and unseen damage. Rain always finds your house’s weaknesses. A brand-new roof is fantastic to have, but if someone didn’t power-nail just one shingle correctly, your dining room ceiling suddenly has a soft spot. No matter how it comes in, no matter who tries to guide it — authenticity affects anyone and everyone it comes into contact with. Department chairs and 23-year-old English instructors included.