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She had the karaikudi kulambu that night, and for seven days gushed of its authenticity to her friends. (The owner had withheld all the spice and hailed from Goa, anyway.)

On Tuesday, at the markets, she saw discovered a twine-bundled set of ceramic tiles, lovingly handpainted with snowy mountains and native fish. She hung them by the dining table and scheduled in a brunch, her girlfriends dutifully spotting them and agreeing in choir—mhm, gorgeous! And so authentic. (Both tilemaker and artist lived in the Philippines; neither had seen snow.)

Whatever she loved was necessarily authentic, and anything authentic she necessarily loved. She demanded vulnerability of others and lavished praise upon them for their compliance. She doled out her own weakness only in carefully calibrated, thematic ways—decrying the difficulty of being genuine at work or of figuring out what she really wanted out of life; surface-level imperfections that she was giddy to concede so long as you knew that authenticity was always foremost in her heart.

An intervention was deemed necessary. Her girlfriends strategised a softening of the blow: white wine & pretzel-making at Laura's—something fun, something sure to provoke a comment they could hinge off but with a reassurance that their hangouts didn't need to change. They did love her, really! Just chill on the authenticity thing a little while.

So they had some wine and sat her down and told her what they thought. What they had been thinking, she realised, for months. What they'd agreed on together, maybe even with others, and oh god were there others? A secret cabal of homemade haters, enemies of the true and raw, fakers, fakers! All these years of gradually letting down her shields only to find herself pincered, the foundation-masks before her totally unconvincing, how could she have been so blind..?!

The feedback wasn't unkind. It had been masterfully done; balanced well, the right words chosen and delivered soft. But it was authentic. And she hated it.