Recently, I had a falling out with someone who
told me in parting that they could, at the very least,
always count on me to look out for myself. Not look
after. Not take care of. Look out. As in, that ball is
about to hit your head. Look out. Engage your
defenses.
While I didn’t fight this, I can’t forget it,
because weeks after the conversation I still find
myself struggling to work through all the bitter
complexities of the statement. Putting my needs
first — is that not a base element of personhood?
In the moment, I thought I was acting on what
I knew about myself, what I knew about what I
wanted. The swell of regret crept in, first slowly
and then all at once. So pervasive was the doubt
then, the feeling that I knew nothing about what
was good for me. What happens when we think
we know ourselves?
I don’t entirely know what is with the
always randomly felt and forever forceful
urge to be on my own, to ensure the fewest
tethers — this is what I was acting on, what
the plaintiff was referring to. Even when
any sort of relationship seems to be going
well, even if I’m with someone who I think
is good for me, the urge still comes. Could
my actions be driven by a questioning of
what I feel I deserve? Moving through life
acting on these defenses has always felt like
acting on the opposite of principle, a shield
against what may or may not be a true self,
an unlovable self.
There’s an important difference in
connotation between taking care of and
looking out for oneself, it seems; while the
former is often touted as a necessary, emo-
tionally conscious act of fulfilling one’s
own needs, the latter is rife with defense
and paranoia — looking out as if always on
guard, watching, waiting.
Solitude feels safe, but also, crucially, not
always what I imagine it to be. Solitude is not
always a night to yourself in a closed bed-
room exhausting the playlists or reading the
books or watching the movies, the ones you
have already seen. Sometimes, it’s lying restless in
the dark and wishing you could go back and change
it all. Sometimes solitude is just loneliness disguised
in the thick manifest of expectation.
Last winter — and it always happens in winter
— I experienced a bout of loneliness I had imposed
on myself, like purgatory I felt I deserved. I kept
wishing to be with someone, but then as soon as
I was, reality was never what I imagined it to be:
They sat in a chair at my desk instead of the cor-
ner of my bed, kissed me coming right instead of
left and without the proverbial “spark” that Sev-
enteen magazine had always promised would
accompany kissing. It was imperfect and over-
whelming and when the night ended, I would
think back through every moment, what I had
said, what I didn’t say. What I did do, what I didn’t.
I had hardly tried to enjoy it.
I feel as though I’m full of sickly contradic-
tions, seeking and wanting this solitude while also
wishing it didn’t have to be the case — wanting
to be around nobody and everybody at the same
time. Feeling ambivalence and even apathy about
some things one minute, and then total fervor the
next. Because as much as I hate to admit it, I don’t
know myself nearly as well as I think I do.
It’s 2013 and a tired waiter is taking my fam-
ily’s order at dinner. Asks if we would like drinks. I
shake my head, declining, and my mother laughs,
ordering something for me anyway, claiming,
“Taylor, sometimes I know you better than you
know yourself.”
She would go on to explain, “Once our drinks
arrive and you don’t have one with your meal,
you’ll want mine.” This presumption always both-
ered me, and not only because she was right, but
because she had confidently surmised that know-
ing one pattern of behavior indicated that she
knew my whole self. She wasn’t really saying that,
but that’s how I saw the explanation then, and still
see it now. She could have said that she, as both my
mother and someone who was not me, saw pat-
terns that I could not, or would not, admit to. But I
was 13 and my mother prefers maxims.
A cautious desire to understand what drives
our perceptions of ourselves has dogged me ever
since. We are presupposed to believe that if we
know ourselves, we are well off — we have placed
ourselves in a position to succeed. Once we are
familiarized with our own styles of learning,
behaving and feeling, it then follows that we can
feel at peace with what we have experienced and
felt and what we will experience and feel. These
are possibilities, the books and movies and songs
have said, where it is both possible and beneficial
to know ourselves. But let’s not pretend that there
aren’t limits, or that we haven’t already bought
into its warped promise.
What have I already bought into? Perhaps it’s
not just solitude that I seek, but an escape from
being my own spectator. Maybe all these years of
journaling have convinced me that if I’m able to
articulate precisely how I feel, down to the tight
clamp of an impulse, I can predict how any given
situation might impact me. So maybe I’ve deluded
myself.
Am I just a combination of predisposition,
expected presentation of personality and actual
desires, of which I have not even the slightest clue
how much each factor is divided? And is that fine?
I take a Myers-Briggs test. I take an Ennea-
gram test. Their result pages show me bite-
sized pieces of information about who I am and
why, my strengths and weaknesses, and as nice
and neat as this information presents itself, I’m
hesitant. It’s come too easily, I feel. Only 20 or 30
thoughtful yet still general questions, and sud-
denly I’m known?
Philosophy and its concerns about the nature of
the self have always interested me — its competing
strains of thought, each on a determined search
for answer and reason, while also making it clear
that any definitive conclusions about human
nature and our world cannot truly exist.
A most distrustful strain of philosophy, which
has both intrigued and terrified me ever since I’ve
come across it, is solipsism, first recorded by the
Greek presocratic Gorgias. Solipsism is the theory
that if the outside world and other’s minds cannot
be known, the self is all that is sure to exist. Others,
such as Anita Avramides of Stanford University,
define it as, “the problem of other minds.”
John Horgan, a journalist best known for his
1996 book “The End of Science,” elaborated on
this idea in Scientific American, arguing, “As
crazy as this proposition seems, it rests on a brute
fact: each of us is sealed in an impermeable prison
cell of subjective awareness.”
Horgan continues, “Even if you reject solipsism
as an intellectual position, you sense it, emotion-
ally, whenever you feel estranged from others,
whenever you confront the awful truth that you
can never know, really know another person, and
no one can really know you.” I find the solipsism
problem to be a useful, even if sad, way of defin-
ing the loneliness in being yourself. It is written
on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo in Del-
phi, “Γνῶθι σεαυτόν.” Know thyself. It was then
Shakespeare who wrote in his play “Hamlet,”
“To thine own self be true.” These famed men
realized the virtues in learning about yourself, in
knowing your tendencies: Break bad patterns, feel
more comfortable in various situations, plan and
predict with accuracy. But these benefits, while
admirable, don’t constitute knowing yourself.
Maybe they do, in the limited sense. But not fully.
In E.M. Cioran’s “The Trouble With Being
Born,” a collection of short, nihilistic phil-
osophical musings, he wrote, “Once we
appeal to our most intimate selves, once we
begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim
to gifts, we become unconscious of our own
gaps. No one is in a position to admit that
what comes out of his own depths might be
worthless. ‘Self-knowledge?’ A contradic-
tion in terms.”
It is incredibly difficult, if even possible,
to see ourselves objectively. I’ll always have
motives, and I can’t pretend to ignore them,
or pretend they’re not pressing. The more I
think about it, the more that I feel I can con-
clude that this delusion of self-knowledge
is just human element, a completely natu-
ral response to the complex layers of our
existence. I then wonder: Is the search for
reason — the existence of philosophy — just
a symptom of living?
There are, admittedly, parts of us that
are easy to know — why we are uncomfort-
able in the face of affection, why we prefer
outgoing people as friends, why we aspire
to be certain things — those are the easy
things, things which give us the impres-
sion that we do or could know ourselves.
As Ali Smith would say in her best book,
“Autumn,” “That’s the thing about things.”
Know this: There are hundreds of thousands
of different versions of yourself that exist in the
minds of others, people you have loved, hated,
wanted or met for only a minute. People that you
lock eyes with on the bus or with whom you share
notes in class, people that could forget you when
out of the periphery, or who could remember you
until they die. Versions that if ever presented to
you, may be unrecognizable.
There are hardly any definitive conclusions
here — this is exactly what I’m trying to get at. You
can know yourself, but never completely, or prop-
erly, and at long last, I think that’s just fine. It’s still
a worthwhile pursuit. There’s the point: pursuit.
Because no matter how many details of my early
life I untangle in therapy sessions, no matter how
much I try to intellectualize my emotions in my
journals, there remain those slippery, ineluctable,
unattractive truths. Ones that I will never fully
know or understand. I don’t mind them now as
much as I used to.
Wednesday, September 15, 2021 // The Statement — 2
On knowing yourself
Design by Dory Tung
BY TAYLOR SCHOTT, STATEMENT COLUMNIST