self-knowledge

Roderick O’Connor, Seascape, Orange and Red Rocks

Relationships are mirrors and it’s taken a long time for me to be okay with my reflection. I’ve always been jealous of people who make it work with their college sweethearts. Smart people who meet their partner early in life and have happy relationships tend to be balanced, grounded, and kind. I have some of these qualities, but I’m also spiky in ways that I find difficult to grapple with, and it’s taken me every day of the past 10 years to process my own contradictions.

What I’ve learned from my own relationships, my friends’ relationships, and coaching is that unfulfilling relationships tend to be the result of two things: lack of self-knowledge and unwillingness to act. You’d be surprised by how many people freeze up when I ask them what they value in life, let alone romantic relationships. The type of person I’m most often surrounded by—cerebral, conscientious, addicted to optimizing—tends to feel most comfortable with frameworks and objective facts. They want to look to the data to figure out the right thing to do, the right person to want, the right partner to be. Looking inwards makes them uncomfortable. It’s panic-inducing: no one can tell you the correct way to feel. But how can you trust your feelings when they’re so changeable? How can you trust your feelings when they might be deceptive? How do you know what the deepest thing is?

The amount of discomfort you have to endure to really know yourself, feel yourself, is sometimes unbearable. Sometimes I think I’d rather do literally anything else, and I’ve done literally everything else. Fly to China. Write a book. Go to yoga. Go for a run. Get drinks with a friend. Get high and watch a movie. Cut my hair. Scroll TikTok. There was a moment this week when I was on the phone with R and he was questioning me about my avoidance and I literally could not stop myself from compulsively scrolling Depop as we talked.

Honesty with yourself involves confronting a lot of difficult emotions directly. And what do you get in return for enduring fear, pain, guilt, regret, and doubt? The reward is so tentative: accountability, self-knowledge, a cohesive internal experience. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to push themselves in ways that are painful and challenging for the most intangible of results.

I’m not even sure why I care about it. The simplest explanation is that I have such an internally contradictory psyche that I end up behaving in insane ways unless I really reckon with what I actually want. I value both safety and risk, structure and freedom, containment and connection. I have an extreme appetite for complexity, but it also dismays me. I love connection, but I’m afraid of losing it. It’s been hard for me to really figure out what that nets out to: who I am, what I need, how I should live.