Chayma Charifi

You’re a small town baker with a knack for making really delicious peach cobblers. Your bakery has always been popular in your town, but your popularity skyrocketed when you put your peach cobblers on display.

This new acclaim is nice, sure. But what is really meaningful for you, above all, is that your peach cobbler is out for the world to enjoy. You’ve been in the kitchen for as long as you can remember, and now you feel comfortable enough to share your delicacies with the world. This is more than a job for you; each peach cobbler is your personal love letter to the culinary arts. It’s a testament to years spent perfecting your craft.

Recently, you noticed a bakery pop up across the street from you. You love baking, so you’re excited. Finally, more bakers to befriend. After you close up shop, you walk over to the other side to introduce yourself and try out some of their baked goods.

Your initial excitement is immediately subdued with confusion. To your surprise, the venue is decorated the same as your own bakery, from the plaques on the wall to the signs on the display. And their signature baked good? A peach cobbler.

You decide to stomach your suspicions with a slice of their peach cobbler and an apple crisp. As the cashier rings you up, you gawk once again at their peach cobbler display. The cobbler isn’t identical to yours, don’t get me wrong, but the presentation is laughably similar. You take a bite, however, and of course, the dessert tastes nothing like yours down the street.

Out of curiosity, you take a bite out of one of their apple crisps. You’ve never made apple crisps before; you’ve always been more of a peach person. Contrary to “their” peach cobbler, you really enjoyed their apple crisp recipe. You munch and leave, wondering why this isn’t their signature item.

You might not be a baker, but maybe you’ve experienced something like this in your own life. I certainly have.

There is, it seems, a tendency for people to copy instead of create—especially at a time when attention can be currency. On a smaller scale, this might look like emulating one’s style or copying their turns of phrase. Albeit annoying, this is ultimately harmless.

The actual slight, in my opinion, is when one takes ownership over something that means a lot to you, something that gives you a sense of purpose, something you’re passionate about—so much so that it might very well be the reason you get out of bed in the morning.

That is your peach cobbler. Your peach cobbler might be poetry or songwriting. It could be storytelling or painting. It could even be facets of your personality, which is often the case when one’s intellectualism or artistic vision can’t be replicated. This is also reinforced by what I mentioned earlier about attention as currency. If your wit or voice is marketable, then your peach cobbler functions more like an unguarded lottery ticket on a publicly accessible cafe table.

The aforementioned metaphor stops at being an inconvenient and shady lucrative business for those not passionate about their literal peach cobblers. But for the others and their metaphorical peach cobblers, seeing someone pass off your ideas as their own can be soul crushing. A stolen business idea and poorly replicated recipe is one thing. A peach cobbler takes an hour to make. Honing your life’s purpose? That takes decades.

But what of the apple crisps?

These are the genuine passions of the metaphorical identity thieves that have been abandoned in pursuit of the other metaphorical baker’s shiny product. These are the facets of their identity that could generate an equivalent metaphorical profit to the peach cobbler, if given a chance. More intimately, though, these are perhaps the gifts that they believe are not good enough—gifts that shed light on their unique talents—that will stop seeing the shelves when the baker has built a sweet life with someone else’s dessert.

They still deserve a sweet life, though. It just won’t be as sweet when it’s artificial—the way Sweet’N Low isn’t as sweet as Domino. Or the way Domino isn’t as sweet as honey.

We owe it to ourselves to sweeten up our life, to show up as ourselves.

Profit lines your wallets. Attention feeds your ego. Peach cobbler fills your stomach. But what enriches your soul?

Is it worth starting a successful business with someone else’s dreams as your foundation? Do your new customers see you beyond your hands offering them your product? The friends you’ve made and the followers you’ve gained by parading around as someone else—they watch your lips move, but do they hear your voice?

You owe it to yourself to live as authentically as you are. Profit, attention, any stamp of approval, will undoubtedly come after you’ve cultivated your own purpose. And if it isn’t a stamp on a letter, your validation might just be handing off your own metaphorical peach cobbler to the loyal customer who races to your bakery right after their shift.