"Everybody has their own way of tapping into their realness"
About this Quote
“Realness” is one of those slippery words that pretends to be plainspoken while smuggling in a whole worldview. Coming from Sandra Bernhard, it’s less a self-help slogan than a sly permission slip. Her comedy and acting have always played on the friction between performance and authenticity: the stage persona that’s “too much,” the celebrity machine that rewards “relatable,” the queer-adjacent downtown sensibility that treats identity as something you craft, not something you confess.
The line works because it refuses to pick a side in the tired argument of “be yourself” versus “everything is performative.” Bernhard implies both are true. You don’t discover realness like buried treasure; you tap into it like a signal. “Tapping” suggests technique, ritual, even hustle. It’s work. It’s also personal. The phrase “their own way” quietly rejects gatekeeping, the idea that authenticity comes with a uniform, a politics, or the right aesthetic. If you’ve ever been told you’re “trying too hard,” Bernhard’s subtext is: maybe trying is the point.
There’s cultural timing baked into it, too. Bernhard came up in an era when women and queer performers were penalized for seeming calculated, aggressive, or self-mythologizing. Her point is that “real” isn’t the absence of artifice; it’s the alignment between your performance and your interior truth. Realness, here, is less purity than agency.
The line works because it refuses to pick a side in the tired argument of “be yourself” versus “everything is performative.” Bernhard implies both are true. You don’t discover realness like buried treasure; you tap into it like a signal. “Tapping” suggests technique, ritual, even hustle. It’s work. It’s also personal. The phrase “their own way” quietly rejects gatekeeping, the idea that authenticity comes with a uniform, a politics, or the right aesthetic. If you’ve ever been told you’re “trying too hard,” Bernhard’s subtext is: maybe trying is the point.
There’s cultural timing baked into it, too. Bernhard came up in an era when women and queer performers were penalized for seeming calculated, aggressive, or self-mythologizing. Her point is that “real” isn’t the absence of artifice; it’s the alignment between your performance and your interior truth. Realness, here, is less purity than agency.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
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