Permission Granted

What do I do when authenticity and relationship feel at odds with each other? It's a weighty question in these days of determination to bring my full self to the table everywhere I go and in everything I do. A determination necessitated by so many years of diminishing or compromising selfhood in order to sustain relationship.
I feel an opposite tug in these middle years. Relationships be damned. I will be me, and if who I am is so unattractive that relationships begin to drop away, so be it. I give myself permission, whatever the cost, to be myself. A permission only I withheld from me.
I heard a stranger say, "When we are in our twenties, we are concerned with what everyone else thinks about us. When we are in our forties, we don't give a damn what anyone else thinks about us. And when we are in our sixties, we realize that no one else has been thinking about us."
I've got a long ways to go before I reach my sixties.