Being unsure of who you are may be the start of really knowing who you are.
We discover, learn, and grow when we question. This is as true for knowing yourself as it is for knowing mathematics. However, questing who we are often does not arise at a time of our choosing and can be unsettling, even painful.
Accepting that we may not really know who we are is the beginning of learning who we actually are, or need to become. This discovery of self may require the capacity to work from a long-sustained position of not knowing who we really are. Often, this kind of doubt is seen as a dilemma, or at worst, a pathology that must be quickly filled with a comfortable narrative about our identity or life situation. However, being able to explore self-knowing from a position of curiosity may yield greater benefit.
The late mythologist, Joseph Campbell, in A Hero With A Thousand Faces, tells us that the knights seeking the Holy Grail would begin their search by entering into the darkest part of the forest. This tale echoes a Spanish proverb informing a curious traveler that there is no trail, but that the trail is made by the walking. These stories and myths encourage us to use periods of self-doubt to explore our unique depths. We may even need to endure long periods of seeking to understand who we are. Perhaps we can come to see, as Herman Hesse says in Demian, “Everyone’s life is a road to himself, to self-realization…”
Although we must find our own way, we can learn from how others have lived their lives. Through exploring history and literature, we can place ourselves in the context of a human condition that inherently includes self-doubt. These tales and myths are not readily mimicked, but rather normalize our doubt, helping us bring curiosity and safety to an otherwise potentially-disintegrating state of mind.
Witnessing how others have lived in a state of doubt, and what they gained, can sustain us in our own self-doubt.
Self-doubt is often experienced as a profound feeling of not fitting-in, as being different or unique, but in a painfully-estranged way. Although this feeling of alienation could be reduced to the cliché of merely having an existential crisis, we are better served by not naming it, but elaborating on it. Colin Wilson does this masterfully in his book, The Outsider. His book examines the works and lives of philosophers and literary masters who display an undying sense of being an outsider. Colin Wilson wrote The Outsider in his twenties and the book became a phenomenon in Great Britain, and elsewhere. He went on to write in science fiction and the occult, reflecting his own outsiderness.
Wilson describes the outsider as being consumed by a quest to find purpose or meaning beyond what their society seems to provide. “The outsider wants something more, something deeper, more spiritual, more intense, something that makes demands on him, rather than letting him ‘take it easy,’ as most things in our world are geared toward.” This excerpt, from a tribute to Colin Wilson, written by Gary Lachman after Wilson’s death in 2013, points at the power that comes out of embracing an estrangement from the readily-available narratives of our culture. For outsiders, seeking to understand themselves defines them, and becomes an affirmation of their life’s meaning.
Another outsider, Henry Adams, is self-revealed in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams Link. Henry Adams, the scion of United States presidents, reveals for us how he experiences his life, including his years in Paris at the end in the nineteenth century. Throughout, he repeatedly reflects on how he really has no idea what he ought to do with his life, or even fundamentally, of what is his purpose or meaning. Yet, reading of his adventures, meeting with diverse politicians and intellectuals, we get a sense that our voyeurism is a reflection of Adams’ way of discovering himself. Adams’ voyeurism is not passive observing, but a deep resonance of self as contrasted to others. Such a participatory engagement will reveal who we are, through what we see in others.
Robert Pirsig offers up an extreme, inner journey of an outsider’s self-discovery in his semi-autobiographical writing that exposes his profound self-doubt and his struggle between madness and genius. His book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was the bible of every lost soul in the 1970s. Pirsig’s struggle between feeling insane, or brilliantly able to see beyond conventionality, matures throughout his life. By the time he writes his second novel, Lila, in 1992, he has accepted this tension as an aspect of who he is as a person. What had been a crisis transforms into a deep self-awareness and acceptance. Lila is semi-fictional, autobiographical depiction of a man searching for self-knowledge, but who ends up articulating a metaphysics of epistemology. Pirsig takes his search for self-knowledge into an examination of how we come to know anything, not just who we are. For Pirsig, his answer lies in how we evaluate our experiences. Creating a value is neither subjective nor objective, but is a truth beyond subject and object. For Pirsig, how we value things is the ultimate form or knowing. The veracity of his philosophy need not be a concern, because we can learn from his journey. When we hold our self-doubt with an open curiosity, over time we can come to see how the doubt itself was a form of self -awareness.
The road to self-awareness is not only long and winding, but the self is actually traveling on many roads simultaneously. Understanding the complex and disparate nature of the self is vital to truly navigating a journey of self-knowledge.