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

