Know Thyself
In the core curriculum of the Navigate membership, community members are asked to do something called the Change Exercise: a practice based on the Serenity Prayer. Here members examine their limitations to determine whether or not they’re something they can change, and how they can have the serenity to accept them if they can’t.
The Change Exercise is impossible without honesty.
If I had to pick one thing that sat at the very bedrock of creating a more joyful life, it would be self-awareness - knowing thyself. We simply can’t take the steps necessary to change without knowing who we are and being able to honestly and courageously own that reality.
I would also go so far as to say that this incredibly life-giving ability is quickly becoming a lost art. In part, because of the same forces that bring you here seeking change and understanding: social media which allows us to curate an utterly unrealistic and downright false persona of ourselves to stand in for our whole selves to the outside world. An attention economy designed to keep us engaged with a tidal wave of content to perpetually distract us with base impulses, desires, and keep us from focusing on anything more meaningful for very long. A media environment that thrives on distorting and manipulating our emotions and perceptions to keep us clicking.
We have a million ways to hide from ourselves- one more show to binge, hours of feed on our social channels, virtual realities where we can tell any story we like about who we are.
Furthermore, the ever-present force of FOMO tells us that we shouldn’t be focused on who we are, we should be focused on what other people are- that we should be deciding our wants, needs, and identities on those same curated collages of perfect lives, relationships, and sourdough loaves. Furthermore, when we see those fake realities and know that we don’t measure up to them, we feel shame, guilt, self-loathing, and are powerfully motivated not to think about who we really are, because the reality will never be ‘Grammable.
The relationships most easily available to us don’t call for us to be fully self-aware, because they actively discourage the depth and intimacy that real relationships- those warm human connections associated with longer, healthier lives- demand.
Self-awareness is becoming a lost art because it would seem that there are plenty of reasons not to bother, and painful consequences to bothering.
I’d like to give you a contrary position to think about: the great American author and founder of the “gonzo journalism” literary movement Hunter S. Thompson had this to say in his book The Proud Highway:
“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
Even if we have lots of friends or “friends,” even if we’re blessed with a large and happy family, even if we have a busy job with lots of coworkers and labours demanding our attention, if you were to make a chart at the end of our lives totalling the time we spent with every person we had ever encountered, the person that would always win- with an unbeatable 100% of the time- is ourselves. We are always with ourselves, and the first and last thoughts we will have in our lives will be ours and ours alone, no matter how we live our lives.
If you had to spend every minute of your lives from now on with another person- every second, awake, asleep, clothed, naked, whether in mixed company or just the two of you- wouldn’t you want to know everything about that person? Wouldn’t you want to know what you can depend on them for and what you can’t, what they think of you, what their hopes and fears are for you? Wouldn’t you hope that they’d like you, or at least respect you, so you can spend your lifetime together with some dignity?
That perpetual companion is you. They’re already there and they always have been- your internal self is an unbroken song you started when you breathed your first breath and ends when you breathe your last. Even if we may sometimes want to- and nearly all of us have at some point or another- we can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t escape who we are.
We cannot expect or hope for the best lives possible if we are unwilling to know ourselves, imperfections and all, and maintain a fundamental love for ourselves as humans even when we’re disappointed, angry, or critical. Simply put, we cannot have lasting joy if we are not a full participant.
There’s another important reason, too: being fully honest with ourselves is a core requirement of actually living the lives we truly want. If we lie to ourselves about our values, our abilities, our wants, and our needs, we make choices, set goals, and live lives in service of those lies, not the truth of who we are- and if we do this, we’ll often wake up one day, years or even decades later, realizing nothing about the lives we’ve built around ourselves makes us truly happy, even when, by the definitions we’ve convinced ourselves of, we have it all.
Being truly honest with ourselves can undoubtedly be painful because it requires us to admit the parts of ourselves that are less than perfect or that don’t align with what we’ve been taught to believe are what the best kind of person is: maybe we convince ourselves that we want children because we’ve internalized that a good woman should, or that we don’t want children because we believe a good feminist doesn’t. Maybe we tell ourselves that taking over the family business, even if we have no interest in it, is the honorable and dutiful thing to do, the only course of action that respects our family, or maybe we tell ourselves that wanting to make a go of being an artist, musician, or a stay-at-home parent is a lazy, selfish thing to want, and best dismissed?
In cases like these, admitting to ourselves what we really do or don’t want will always come with some pain, but the consequence of not doing so is undoubtedly more, deeper pain that lives beneath the surface of our lives, robbing us of joy.
So, cultivate a fearlessly honest relationship with yourself. You don’t need to become a practitioner of “radical honesty,” telling everyone and anyone around you the whole truth all the time. Just give one person- yourself- that gift.
