Are You Being Authentic or Just Adapting to Stay Safe? – An Interview with Liv Wickedly

Liv Wickedly is a writer, artist, and facilitator exploring the places where we know something is not working, but keep living as if it is. Her exclusive Brainz Magazine series, Things We Pretend Are Normal, invites readers into an honest look at the gap between reality as it is, the lives we pretend we want, and the quiet ways we keep participating in what makes us miserable.

Liv Wickedly, Writer, Facilitator & Artist

What first inspired you to create Things We Pretend Are Normal?

Things We Pretend Are Normal came from watching myself do the exact thing I am writing about, knowing something was not true for me, and still participating in it.

At first, I saw it in myself. Then I realized I was not special, which is always both humbling and annoying. Most of us know more than we embody. We know we are stressed. We know overwork is not noble. We know people-pleasing has a cost. We know the body keeps score, boundaries matter, burnout is real, and pretending to be fine does not magically make us fine. We have the language now. We have the podcasts, the memes, the therapy words, the nervous system vocabulary. Still, I watch myself, and the people around me, cooperate with things some deeper part of us is quietly objecting to. That is the part I am interested in.

Not because I think people are stupid, broken, or weak. I think pretending usually makes sense somewhere. It protects belonging, identity, safety, innocence, or the familiar shape of powerlessness. The series began as a way to ask, "What am I still calling normal because questioning it would require me to notice my own participation?"

As you began exploring the series, what patterns of self-abandonment kept showing up across relationships, work, healing, and everyday life?

The biggest pattern I keep seeing is people betraying their own lived experience and calling it something more respectable.

In relationships, it can look like being “easygoing” when you are actually disappearing. At work, it can look like being “reliable” when you are over-functioning. In healing spaces, it can look like endlessly processing yourself instead of telling the truth or making a choice. Everyday life is full of these tiny negotiations where we abandon what we know because belonging, approval, comfort, or avoiding conflict feels more urgent.

I know this pattern because I have done it. I have called self-abandonment responsibility. I have called overextension devotion. I have called silence maturity when it was really fear grabbing the microphone before truth could speak.

What keeps getting my attention is how ordinary it all looks. No dramatic collapse. No villain music. Just a thousand tiny moments where we act against what we know, then call it being good, loyal, professional, spiritual, or fine.

What do we often sacrifice when belonging becomes more important than being honest with ourselves?

We sacrifice contact with reality. That sounds dramatic, but I mean it very practically. When belonging becomes more important than honesty, we start editing our own experience to stay acceptable. We know something bothered us, but we tell ourselves it was not a big deal. We know we want something, but we become low-maintenance instead. We know a room, relationship, job, or community requires us to shrink, but we call it compromise because compromise sounds noble and shrinking sounds pathetic.

Belonging is not the problem. Humans need belonging. I am not interested in pretending we are all meant to become emotionally self-sufficient islands with excellent boundaries and no needs. That sounds terrible and suspiciously boring.

The question is, "What kind of belonging is being offered?" If I have to betray what is true in me to keep my place, then what I have is not belonging. It is membership purchased through self-erasure.

Why do you think so many people struggle to recognize the ways they have adapted to things that do not actually feel true for them?

Because adaptation is sneaky. It does not usually announce itself as self-abandonment. It arrives as being practical, mature, reasonable, chill, grateful, professional, low-maintenance, spiritually evolved, or “not making everything about you.” A lot of what we call personality is actually adaptation that got promoted.

At some point, a person learns what keeps them safe, loved, included, employed, praised, or left alone. Then they repeat it. Eventually, the strategy becomes so familiar it starts to feel like identity. “I am just easygoing.” “I do not need much.” “I am good under pressure.” Maybe. Or maybe your system learned that needing things made life more dangerous (raises hand Howdy from the president of the Rugged Individualism Club).

This is why I think recognition can take so long. We are not usually looking for the false thing because it has been rewarded. Sometimes the thing that does not feel true is also the thing everyone keeps complimenting you for. That is very inconvenient. Rude, honestly.

You write about emotional sovereignty and self-trust, how do those qualities change the way we move through the world?

I do not think self-trust can fully exist without emotional sovereignty. Emotional sovereignty is not about being “an emotional person.” Everyone is emotional. Some people just have better branding.

To me, emotional sovereignty is the ability to recognize emotional information, in yourself and between people, without being ruled by it, denying it, or making someone else responsible for it. It is the difference between staying available to reality long enough to respond clearly and immediately reacting, numbing, dominating, intellectualizing, disappearing, or calling avoidance “peace.”

Without the capacity to stay with what is emotionally true long enough to respond, self-trust becomes conditional. We trust ourselves when people approve. We trust ourselves when nobody is upset. We trust ourselves when the evidence is perfect and the outcome is guaranteed. That is not really trust. That is waiting for permission to believe our own perception.

Sovereignty changes how we move because it brings response back online. We can be impacted without being hijacked. We can feel numbness without mistaking it for neutrality. We can feel ambivalence without making it a stop sign. We can listen without outsourcing our truth. We can care without collapsing. In true sovereignty, no one is unaffected, which means every choice matters.

What role does the body play in helping us distinguish between what is authentic and what has simply become familiar?

The body is an incredible technology. It can play an infinite number of roles because it is where reality is experienced in the most immediate, direct way.

For me, my relationship with my body is one of the clearest reflections of my relationship with truth. Do I ignore pain until it screams? Do I make every ache mean disaster? Do I treat my body like a machine, a trash can, an inconvenience, a project, a performance? Am I caring for my body, or trying to control it into becoming something that finally makes me feel safe?

That relationship tells on us. Not as punishment. As data.

The body carries history, context, memory, hunger, fear, desire, exhaustion, intuition, and whatever is happening right now. Even an old wound showing up in the body is still true now because it is active now.

Familiar may feel safe simply because the body recognizes it. Authenticity may feel uncomfortable because the body has not practiced it yet. Discernment comes from building a relationship with the body that can tell the truth about this exact present moment, the only place we have authority to respond, choose, or create.

The body says, you are here. Start here.

How has your own relationship with authenticity evolved through your writing and creative work?

I used to think authenticity meant expressing myself more fully. Saying the thing. Wearing the thing. Writing the thing. Being louder. Being seen by more people, or maybe more honestly, being recognized for the version of myself I was trying so hard to prove.

Letting the strange little creature inside me have a microphone and no adult supervision.

I still value play in the ways I express my authenticity. But my relationship with it has become less about performance and more about congruence. Am I telling the truth in the actual life I am living, not just in the art I make about it? Am I being honest in my relationships, my work, my body, my choices, my timing? Am I creating from what is true now, or from an old identity I built around who I used to be?

Writing has made that harder to avoid. Creative work has a way of exposing the places where my language is more evolved than my behavior, which is a frustration I am begrudgingly learning to dance with. It asks me to close the gap between what I can articulate and what I am actually willing to embody.

Rather than offering answers, you often invite people into deeper questions, what can a good question reveal that advice cannot?

Advice can be useful. Sometimes being handed something is exactly what we need. A map, a meal, a sentence that cuts through the fog. I am not anti-advice. I love a well-timed freebie.

But advice can also become something we collect instead of a path we walk. We can consume insight, quote it later, understand it intellectually, and still not move an inch in our actual lives. At a certain point, more information does not create more freedom. It just creates existential indigestion.

A good question has the nasty habit of returning us to our own experience. It asks us to participate. Not in theory. In the living material of our own choices, patterns, relationships, and bodies.

That is why I ask questions. A question can show us where we are now, what we are oriented toward, and what we are organized around. It can reveal where we have confused familiarity with truth, fear with wisdom, silence with maturity, or belonging with safety. Advice often tells us what to do next. A question helps us understand whether the next thing we are being told to do is even ours to follow.

If readers take one thing away from Things We Pretend Are Normal, what do you hope it encourages them to look at more honestly in their own lives?

I hope it encourages people to look more honestly at their participation in the quality of their own lived experience.

I am not trying to change anyone’s mind or hand people a new belief system. I am interested in how willing we are, individually and collectively, to look at what is actually true, not just what is palatable, familiar, convenient, or true enough.

Because there is a gap between reality as it is and the reality many of us say we want to create. That gap is not only political, cultural, relational, or systemic. It is also lived through the choices we make every day, in our relationships, our bodies, our work, our families, our private thought loops, and our relationship to powerlessness.

From there, participation becomes a living question, "What am I helping maintain by continuing to act as though this is normal?"

That is what I hope readers have the courage to ask. Is this how we want to do it anymore? And if not, why am I still doing it this way? What am I participating in, what am I practicing, what am I protecting, and what becomes possible if I tell the truth here?

To follow Liv’s writing, creative work, and the unfolding Things We Pretend Are Normal series, visit her website.

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