I've spent a considerable amount of time attempting to understand myself. Not necessarily out of any particular fascination with my own identity, but because I've always found it difficult to accept that something as intimately familiar as my own mind could remain, in certain respects, so profoundly unintelligible to me.
There is something peculiar about the relationship we maintain with ourselves. We are simultaneously the subjects of our own experiences and the observers attempting to interpret them, which creates an interesting problem: the very instrument through which we examine our behaviour is also responsible for producing it. We tend to assume that introspection provides us with a privileged understanding of our own motivations, yet I increasingly question how much of that understanding is genuine, and how much consists of explanations we construct retrospectively to preserve some sense of internal coherence.
I've often found myself perfectly capable of identifying a particular behavioural pattern, tracing it back to its emotional origins, anticipating its consequences and recognising, with considerable clarity, the reasons why I ought to behave differently. And yet, none of that necessarily prevents me from repeating it.
For a long time, I found this contradiction rather difficult to reconcile. I approached self-understanding almost as though it were an intellectual exercise, assuming that once I had identified the underlying mechanism of a particular behaviour, correcting it would follow as a natural consequence. It seemed reasonable enough. If an action is driven by a certain need, and that need can be identified and examined rationally, why should the action continue to exercise the same influence over us?
But the more I think about it, the less convinced I become that understanding and transformation are as closely related as I once assumed.
We appear to possess an extraordinary capacity to recognise our own irrationality without necessarily becoming any less susceptible to it. I can understand why I seek someone's attention while simultaneously recognising that receiving it will provide only a momentary sense of satisfaction. I can appreciate the importance of emotional independence while finding myself disproportionately affected by the absence of someone whose presence I had grown accustomed to. And I can arrive at a conclusion that seems entirely reasonable, only to discover that my emotional response has remained almost completely indifferent to it.
What I find particularly interesting is that none of these contradictions necessarily imply a lack of sincerity. Both positions can coexist without either being fundamentally dishonest. The part of me that values solitude is no less genuine than the part that occasionally wishes to escape it. My conviction that a certain relationship should remain in the past does not become less valid simply because I continue to miss the person involved.
Perhaps the mistake lies in expecting human identity to exhibit a degree of consistency that human experience itself does not permit.
I sometimes think we construct an excessively unified conception of ourselves. We speak about our character, our values and our desires as though they formed a relatively stable and coherent structure, when in practice they seem far more contingent on circumstance, emotional state and the particular perspective from which we happen to examine them.
This doesn't mean that I consider identity arbitrary, or that I believe we lack a recognisable continuity throughout our lives. On the contrary, I think there is something remarkably persistent about the way we interpret the world, the things to which we attach significance and the principles through which we attempt to organise our existence. But I have become increasingly reluctant to confuse that continuity with consistency.
Perhaps knowing oneself has less to do with eliminating contradictions than with developing the capacity to recognise them without immediately attempting to explain them away.
And yet, even that possibility raises another question. If our understanding of ourselves is necessarily incomplete, what exactly are we asking of others when we express the desire to be understood?
I've always considered being understood a rather important form of intimacy. Not in the sense of having someone agree with me, or validate whatever conclusion I happen to reach, but in the more demanding sense of having another person recognise the reasoning, experiences and emotional considerations from which my perspective emerges. There is a substantial difference between someone knowing what you think and someone understanding why you think it.
Still, I'm not entirely certain that I would welcome the implications of being understood without reservation.
There is a peculiar tension between the desire to make ourselves intelligible to others and the instinct to preserve some degree of distance from their interpretation. We want our intentions to be recognised, our contradictions to be approached with generosity and our experiences to be considered in their appropriate context. But we also want to retain a certain authority over how much of ourselves becomes available for examination.
I wonder whether what we describe as wanting to be understood is sometimes closer to wanting to be interpreted correctly, according to a conception of ourselves that we have already decided is representative.
After all, it is relatively easy to welcome someone's understanding when it confirms what we believe about ourselves. It becomes considerably less comfortable when their interpretation exposes something we have overlooked, minimised or consciously avoided acknowledging.
I find this particularly relevant because I have a tendency to analyse the behaviour of others with the same persistence I apply to my own. I look for explanations, inconsistencies, recurring patterns and motivations that might account for decisions I cannot immediately comprehend. And while I would like to believe that this comes primarily from intellectual curiosity or a genuine desire to understand people, I suspect there are occasions when the pursuit of an explanation is simply a more sophisticated way of attempting to establish control over something inherently uncertain.
Knowing why someone behaves a certain way can make their behaviour easier to accept, or at least easier to situate within a framework that makes sense to us. But the explanation itself does not necessarily change anything. Understanding why someone has become distant does not eliminate the distance. Recognising why a particular experience has affected us does not automatically diminish its significance.
There is an uncomfortable distinction between making sense of something and learning to live with it.
I think much of my difficulty with uncertainty originates here. I've always been inclined to believe that sufficiently careful reasoning should eventually produce a satisfactory explanation. In many areas of life, particularly those governed by technical or formal systems, that expectation is not entirely unreasonable. Problems can be decomposed, assumptions examined, causes isolated and solutions evaluated against observable results.
But the same methodological confidence becomes considerably less reliable when directed towards human experience.
People are not necessarily consistent in their motivations, nor are they always capable of accurately identifying them. Feelings do not reliably respond to arguments, and the passage of time can alter the significance of an experience without changing anything about the experience itself. Even our recollection of events is inseparable from the person we have become since they occurred.
This makes the pursuit of a definitive understanding of oneself a rather questionable objective. Not because introspection is without value, but because the object of our examination is neither entirely accessible nor permanently fixed.
The person attempting to understand an experience is continuously being transformed by the very process of experiencing it.
I find myself returning to that thought with increasing frequency, particularly when considering how confidently I have sometimes interpreted earlier stages of my life. There are decisions I once regarded as entirely justified that I now understand differently, just as there are things I previously considered significant that have gradually lost their importance. I don't think this necessarily means that my earlier interpretations were mistaken. They belonged to a particular moment, informed by circumstances and knowledge that were different from those available to me now.
Perhaps there is a certain arrogance in assuming that our present understanding has finally corrected the limitations of our former selves, when it is equally likely that our future perspective will expose limitations we are currently incapable of recognising.
I'm twenty-one, and although I have no particular interest in diminishing the validity of my own experiences on account of my age, I find it difficult to ignore how provisional many of my convictions must inevitably be. There are aspects of my character that I regard as fundamental, principles I believe I would be unwilling to compromise and conclusions about myself that currently seem reasonably well established.
I suspect some of them will survive the years. Others probably won't.
And I don't find that prospect particularly troubling. If anything, the possibility of eventually disagreeing with myself seems preferable to the alternative of remaining intellectually and emotionally unchanged.
What I am less certain about is whether that change will bring me any closer to the kind of self-understanding I once imagined possible. I may become better at identifying my motivations, more deliberate in my decisions and less inclined to confuse temporary emotional states with permanent truths. But I suspect that each new stage of life will introduce contradictions of its own, some of which I will only recognise once I have acquired sufficient distance from them.
It seems increasingly plausible to me that self-knowledge is not a state we eventually attain, but a relationship we continuously revise.
And perhaps that is where the distinction between understanding ourselves and being understood by others becomes less important than I initially thought. In both cases, we are dealing with interpretations of something that cannot be fully reduced to a single explanation. We can communicate our intentions, examine our behaviour and attempt to represent ourselves faithfully, but there will always remain a certain distance between the experience itself and any account we construct of it.
I don't think that distance necessarily needs to be overcome.
There is value in understanding why we behave as we do, just as there is value in allowing other people to recognise parts of ourselves that we might otherwise struggle to articulate. But I am beginning to think that neither process requires the complete resolution of everything that remains uncertain.
For much of my life, I've treated unanswered questions as indications that I had not yet thought carefully enough. I'm less convinced of that now. Some questions deserve continued examination, certainly, but others may simply require the willingness to proceed without the reassurance of a definitive conclusion.
I suppose I would like to become someone capable of making that distinction.
Not someone who has finally managed to reconcile every conflicting part of himself, or who no longer feels the need to understand the things that affect him, but someone who can recognise the limits of his own understanding without interpreting those limits as a personal failure.
I don't know whether I will eventually arrive at that point, or whether my conception of it will have changed entirely by the time I read these words again.
For now, I can at least recognise the possibility that the distance I have spent so much time trying to eliminate may be an inseparable part of what it means to know myself.