Know Thyself

(Repost from other Medium)

This is a slightly modified version of a letter I wrote to my little brother recently. He said he found it helpful — right before he called me “too extra to function.” Maybe you’ll agree. On either count.

Dear Alex,

You’re a teenager now, and accordingly sitting square in the middle of that most awkward and discombobulating of times. Neither a child blissfully unaware and singularly uninterested in anything but primal needs, nor an adult with some semblance of control and answers to the interminable puzzle of how to be and how to live.

You couldn’t pay me to go back and redo that shit again, and at the same time it was perhaps the most pivotal and shaping period in my life. So I’m both sorry and excited for you in equal measure as you wade through the muck of these long years.

I can’t do it for you, but I can offer one piece of advice, know thyself… or endeavour to at least.

Ok, but how?

There’s an oddly popular consensus that self-interestedness is a bad or at least indulgent thing. It’s odd because in almost any other respect we appreciate that there’s no substitute for careful and diligent scrutiny, if the aim is to fully understand a complex and evolving subject. We appreciate that painstaking study bordering on obsession is necessary to uncover all the details and foundations that make up the whole.

Yet we seemingly consider the character, personality, quirks and nuances that make up a whole ass person, as barely warranting cursory appraisal. We do the equivalent of watching 4 episodes of Scrubs and skimming a Wikipedia article on aortas before stepping into an operating room to perform open heart surgery. Then we wonder why there is blood everywhere.

Ask yourself, consciously and with a listening ear: what are the different facets of your character? What do you love? what do you hate? what makes you laugh? what makes you afraid? anxious? frustrated? relieved? How do you react to the different stimuli the world sends your way? Then if you can identify the answers, ask yourself why? Why do you find that funny? Why does that make you feel warm inside? Why does that other thing grind your gears? Why does that make your heart pick up speed? Why does that bore you? First, taxonomize your person, then unearth the foundations that made those truths true.

Watch yourself like a hawk, think about what you do and what you say and what you’ve done and what you’ve said, ask others for their input, notice the patterns, identify what is consistently the case. Then trace the lines back to why those patterns exist. Repeat ad nauseam. Because of course, it doesn’t end. As soon as you understand one sliver of character, three more have appeared to join the queue. As long as you exist and go through life, you will continue to build the multitudinous layers of who you are.

Then what?

So what’s the point of this life-long labour? Of peering into all the crevices of your soul with a magnifying glass, labelling the truths you discover and then embarking on the archaeological effort of uncovering the why of those truths?

You can explain yourself to other people, you can give them the manual on how to make you happy, how to love you.

Relationships — good ones, whether platonic, familial or romantic — exist to enrich your life. To add support and joy and texture and meaning and experiences. For the person on the other end of that relationship strand to be able to do that, they have to know you, understand you and then be able to use that knowledge to enrich your life. When you can give them the manual on what you’re all about, you give them half of what they need to best serve you (the other half is, of course, a willingness and capacity to do so).

Relationships break down when someone doesn’t know how to make you happy, how to make you feel seen, heard, supported, how to make you laugh, how to comfort you when you cry, how to calm you down when you get angry, how to understand what you’re saying when you speak, what to expect from you and therefore how to trust you.

The more smoky mystery you sweep away with clear answers and insights and cheat codes, the better you set up your relationships to succeed in what relationships are supposed to do (see above).

You can decide what to love and what to change

When you know the details of who you are, and why you are, it lets you divide things into three piles. (1) What you like about yourself, (2) what you don’t like but you can understand and accept and tolerate, (3) what you don’t like and are going to change or work around. In that case what room is there for self-loathing? For needlessly beating yourself up? What you like is great, what you don’t like is understood and either accepted accordingly or being worked on.

When we read or watch stories — those realistically crafted stories with “complex” characters or anti-heroes that are all the rage these days — creators go to great pains to explain their character. To tie their foibles or quirks to reasons and justifications; from childhood trauma to biological tendency to environmental stimulation. Knowing that once we know why something is, we automatically move most or all the way to tolerance, if not forgiveness. Do the same for yourself. Understand why you do what you do, and ditch the guilt over it. What should be in its place then is either an acceptance or a resolution to work through or around that issue. As a small bonus, without the guilt or self-flagellation, the workaround ideas or “solutions” you come up with for the things you want to change will likely be kinder and more realistic ones.

You can assemble the world, the life that best suits you

If you understand yourself and how you tend to react to different stimuli, then you can arrange a life filled with the stimuli you best respond to. If you don’t understand yourself then you’ll likely take whatever life you happen to be in by default and tolerate all sorts of abrasions you could remove if you only knew what they were doing to you. Like when you don’t realise you’re hangry and you just sit there being a pissy bitch for ages when all along just switching out the context to one where you’re eating would have changed everything.

The city you live in, the foods you eat, the job you do, the films you watch, the conversations you have — all of these are just contexts and stimuli that can either be suited to your disposition or abrasively clashing, and if you don’t know what your disposition is then you have no hope of assembling the best constellation of contexts for you.

The caveat

Of course, this is life, not a first player Sims game where you can unilaterally conjure the external truths and contexts you need by force of will.

You can know yourself enough to tell someone what makes you happy and be met by a refusal or incapacity on their part to get the job done. You can know yourself enough to understand what you want to change and not have the resources, or tools or know-how to do that work. You can know yourself enough to understand the ideal assembly of stimuli or context that would make the perfect counterpart and have the universe be like: nah, you can’t have that job, or live in that city, or eat those foods — for any reason from “it doesn’t exist”, to “you’re too black or woman or disabled or coeliac for it”.

This isn’t an attempt to deny context, I’m no Jordan Peterson. I’m just saying that within the very real truths that not everything is in your hands, and that we live in a chronically unfair, unjust and messy world that seems closer to cosmic accident than planned creation — it’s worth trying to know yourself through and through.

Addendum to the caveat…

Speaking of societal injustice — on balance, when you know yourself, it’s a little harder to be or stay part of the problem. Doing this level of critical appraisal on yourself breeds a general appreciation for nuance and tolerance, which you can then turn around and apply to appraising the people around you.

Moreover, prejudices are harder to hold if you make it a point to understand what you do and why. It’s no secret that the societal forces that stop people being met with a fair shot and a level playing field in this world are nothing more than an amalgamation of the ideas we all hold in our heads about those people. If in scrutinising yourself you notice that you react X way to Y people, and then you continue down the rabbit hole to honestly ask yourself why, I’d wager that your conclusion at the end of all that wouldn’t be ‘they genuinely deserve it and my reaction is based on real demonstrable facts’.

So there it is

Sorry it was so long, you know how much I like words. I hope it was at all helpful, even though, like most advice dished out by well meaning big sisters, it was wholly unasked for.

What’s a gal to do though? Life has this funny way of only granting you the insight and knowledge needed to tackle something once you’re far enough past it to see in hindsight. The only real revenge open to us is to pass the learnings on to someone else who’s just about to come up against the same hurdles.