An Essay on Identity, Authenticity, and the Weight of Unchosen Lives

With regards to Milan Kundera

Preface

It would be easier to just be 'normal'. To cohere with the majority turn of the card.

But life is not like that. We are born as an unknown entity, floating in a culture that we had no hand in making, and which immediately makes us as it feels is appropriate. Based on whatever hegemonic concepts are dominant at the time.

I guess if we were conscious of all this at a very early age, we wouldn't commit. Purposefully, because we'd know that such commitment would lead to deterministic unhappiness. You chose your bed, and on it you will lie.

So we equivocate. We try to put off the greatest commitments (career, role, family...) if we can. Very often the pressure of family and society will seduce us onto a path we never really wanted to take.

And thus, the future became fixed, and as time went on, it became too late to say: "What have I done?"

So, take off your leaden shoes. Fly in the air of indeterminacy. Yes, it is unbearable when compared to the fatality of social conformity. But at least the pain of it is yours.

The Facticity of the Body

There is a word that philosophers use — facticity — and it comes in useful here. It refers to the brute, unchosen facts of our existence: when and where we were born, the body we inhabit, and the social position we inherit. These facts are given to us before we have any say in them, and they come loaded with a whole series of expectations, assumptions, and obligations that we never signed up for.

Kundera understood this. In his novel, Tomas lives under the weight of his particular facticity — a surgeon in Prague, a man of letters, a lover of heavy Mozart. And it is precisely the lightness of certain choices (the choice of a woman, the choice of a word) that he finds unbearable, because he knows that weight is where meaning lives.

But here is what Kundera perhaps didn't say explicitly enough: facticity includes the body, and the body is where the most profound negotiations of authenticity take place. For those of us who live in bodies that do not match what the world expects of us, this negotiation is not philosophical. It is embodied, daily, and unavoidable.

I know something about this. I transitioned late in life — at fifty-three — after decades of performing a version of myself that the world found legible. And I can tell you that there is nothing lightweight about the experience of waking up one day and realising that the self you have been presenting to the world is a kind of fiction you wrote to pay the rent of social acceptance.

The Hegemony of the Normal

What does it mean to be "normal"? Ludwig Wittgenstein (whose philosophy I find myself returning to, again and again) taught us that meaning is use and that language games derive their power from the forms of life in which they are embedded. The norm is not simply a statistical category. It is a regulatory ideal — a standard against which bodies, behaviours, and biographies are measured and found acceptable or wanting.

To be normal is to be legible. To fit the categories that the world has prepared for you. And the world prepares these categories in advance of your arrival. When you are born, the language is already waiting for you: boy or girl, daughter or son, citizen, worker, believer. These are not neutral descriptions. They are scripts. And scripts come with stage directions you never agreed to follow.

The philosopher Louis Althusser, drawing on a tradition that runs from Hegel through Marx, gave us the concept of interpellation: the process by which ideology hails us, calls us into being as subjects. When someone calls "Hey, you there!" and you turn around, you have been constituted as a subject. You have been called into existence by a discourse that pre-existed you.

This is not conspiracy. It is simply how social being works. We are all hailed into subjects long before we have the conceptual equipment to understand what is happening to us.

The Seductive Pull of the Default Path

And so most people — most of the time — go along with it. Why wouldn't they? The default path is comfortable precisely because it requires nothing of you in the way of justification. This is what people do. This is what is expected. This is how it goes.

Bourdieu, the French sociologist, called this doxa. It is the taken-for-granted worldview that naturalises the social order and makes it feel like common sense rather than an historical construction. The default life is not just easier. It is invisible as a choice. It appears to be simply the way things are.

I spent many years inside doxa. I did the things that were expected of me. I performed masculinity competently — not because I was good at it, but because I was terrified of what might happen if I stopped. The performance was, in Bourdieu's terms, orthexia: right practice, the embodied dispositions that mark you as socially competent in a given field. I was orthoprax. And I was miserable.

The tragedy is that the alternative to this (authentic selfhood, whatever that means) is genuinely frightening. Because authenticity requires you to choose. And choice, as Kierkegaard understood, implicates you. If you didn't choose, you can't be blamed. But if you did choose, then the responsibility is yours, irreducibly.

The Unbearable Weight of Chosen Life

And here is Kundera's paradox made real: it is lighter to not have chosen, even when not choosing is itself a choice. The person who drifts through life, accepting what comes, avoiding the hard commitments, carries a different kind of weight — the weight of the unlived life, of the self that might have been.

But the person who chooses — who says this is who I am, this is what I stand for, this is the body I will inhabit, this is the work I will do — that person has to carry the knowledge that they did this. That they could have done otherwise. That the meaning of their life is, at least in part, their own responsibility.

This is genuinely unbearable. And Kundera is right that the unbearable thing is not the heaviness of obligation but the lightness of self-created meaning. Because heaviness, at least, is something that happens to you. Lightness, the lightness of a life deliberately constructed, has to be continuously justified.

I think of this when I consider what it means to be a transgender woman who came out late. The weight of those fifty-three years of misrecognition by others, but also by myself, was enormous. But there is a weight on the other side too: the weight of having chosen to stop pretending. Of having said this is who I actually am, knowing that I could have kept the pretence going. Of having made my own meaning, at some cost.

Flying in the Air of Indeterminacy

So what is the alternative? Not some naive authenticity that pretends we are unconstrained by facticity. We cannot choose our bodies, our histories, the languages we inherit, or the social positions we occupy at birth. The situation is always already given.

But within and against that situation, there is room — sometimes very narrow room — for what the existentialists called authenticity: the practice of owning one's choices as one's own, of refusing to hide behind the anonymous authority of they and one and that's just how it is.

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir — whose work on The Ethics of Ambiguity I find more useful than much of Sartre's more celebrated writing — argued that we are situated in freedom: always positioned, always constrained, but never entirely determined. Freedom is not the ability to do anything at all. It is the ability to do something, within the conditions that are given. And the ethical task is not to escape those conditions but to engage with them honestly, acknowledging both their constraints and the space they leave open.

This is not glamour. Authenticity is not a state of grace. It is a practice. Daily, practical, unglamorous. It means examining the scripts you have been given and asking: do I actually want to follow this one? It means being willing to be thought strange, to be ill at ease in rooms designed for someone else, and to carry the unbearable lightness of having made your own meaning in a world that would prefer you didn't.

At Least the Pain Is Yours

There is a line in Kundera's novel (actually spoken by a character who is, in many ways, the novel's moral centre) that I find myself returning to again and again. It goes something like: the only thing that is truly ours is our suffering.

This sounds bleak. But I don't think it is. It is, instead, a quiet realism about the conditions of human existence. Most of what happens to us (the cards we are dealt, the world we are born into, the bodies we come to inhabit) is not of our choosing.

But what we make of it (the meanings we construct, the choices we own, the selves we refuse to abandon even when the world would prefer we did) that is ours. And the pain of it is at least a pain that we can recognise as ours. It is not performed. It is not a script. It is, in the deepest sense, ours.

The leaden shoes are heavy. But they are someone else's design. The air of indeterminacy is terrifying. But at least when you fall, you know it was your fall.

That is, I think, worth something. Even if, especially if, it is unbearable.

Bea Groves-McDaniel — October 24th 2026