Knowing yourself doesn't save you from yourself

on self-awareness, emotional control, and the things we still can't reason our way out of

There is something deeply irritating about the way we talk about self-awareness. We speak about it as though discovering the truth about ourselves is the same thing as gaining control over ourselves. Understand your attachment. Understand your childhood. Understand your insecurities. Understand why you react the way you do. Learn your patterns, name your wounds, identify your triggers, and suddenly you are supposed to become this perfectly functioning person who sees every emotion coming from a mile away and calmly chooses the correct response.

I believe in knowing yourself. I think it is one of the most important things a person can do. I would rather know the ugly parts of myself than spend my entire life pretending they aren’t there. But I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that awareness should somehow make us immune to our own humanity. It doesn’t. Sometimes knowing yourself just means you get to watch yourself struggle with something you already understand.

That is the part nobody seems to prepare you for. You can know your pattern and still repeat it. You can recognise the insecurity underneath your reaction and still feel the insecurity. You can understand exactly why something is happening inside you and still be unable to make it stop. There is a miserable gap between seeing yourself clearly and having the discipline to respond differently, and I think that gap is where most people actually live.

We are so impressed by the moment of recognition that we forget how much work comes after it. Realising that you are anxious is awareness. Learning how to sit with that anxiety without immediately making somebody else responsible for relieving it is something else entirely. Knowing that you seek reassurance is awareness. Learning to tolerate uncertainty when reassurance is unavailable is the work. The first part gives you language. The second part demands something from you.

And I don’t want to dismiss self-awareness in making this argument. Quite the opposite. I think knowing your patterns is essential. How are you supposed to change something you cannot see? How are you supposed to take responsibility for behaviour when you have never examined where it comes from? There is enormous value in being able to catch yourself and think, I know what this is. That moment matters. It can stop you from blaming another person for every uncomfortable thing you feel. It can make you question the stories your mind tells you. It can give you enough distance to realise that a feeling is happening inside you rather than treating every feeling as proof that something outside you is wrong. But awareness is a beginning. We keep treating it like a conclusion.

Maybe that is why I get frustrated with the way psychological language has entered everyday life. We have become remarkably good at explaining ourselves. Sometimes understanding yourself is genuinely transformative. But sometimes we have simply become better at narrating our behaviour while continuing to behave the same way. There is a point where self-analysis stops being self-awareness and becomes a very sophisticated form of avoidance. You can spend an entire evening explaining why you are angry and never ask what you are going to do with that anger.

That distinction matters to me because I don’t think emotional maturity means becoming someone who doesn’t experience difficult emotions. I don’t think the goal is to become so healed that jealousy never touches you, rejection never hurts you, loneliness never unsettles you and desire never makes you irrational. That sounds less like emotional health and more like emotional sterilisation.

We are human beings. We are going to have feelings that make us uncomfortable. We are going to want things that aren’t good for us. We are going to become attached to people who cannot give us what we want. We are going to feel threatened by things that aren’t actually threats. We are going to misunderstand people. We are going to behave badly sometimes. The fact that we experience these things is not evidence that we have failed to understand ourselves. The question is whether we can experience them without allowing them to dictate everything we do.

I think that is where the word control becomes important, although I don’t mean control in the sense of suppressing yourself. I don’t want to become the kind of person who feels something and immediately tells themselves they shouldn’t. That isn’t control. That is denial. If you are hurt, you are hurt. If you are jealous, you are jealous. If you desperately want someone, you want them. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make you mature. What matters is whether you can separate the feeling from the action it is demanding. You can be furious and still decide not to say the cruel thing that came into your head. You can be anxious and still give another person the space they asked for. That is where discipline begins. You don’t have to destroy the feeling. You have to stop handing it the steering wheel.

And that is much harder than understanding yourself.

Understanding happens in the mind. Regulation has to happen in the middle of the feeling, when your body is reacting and your thoughts are racing and the thing you want most in that moment feels so urgent that everything else seems secondary. It is easy to talk about emotional regulation when you are calm. It is much harder when you are sitting with a phone in your hand, staring at a message, building an entire interpretation out of three words and one hour of silence.

Maybe that is what bothers me about the obsession with finding the perfect explanation for ourselves. We seem to believe that if we can trace every behaviour back to its origin, we will finally have permission to stop taking responsibility for what we do with it. I had an absent parent. I was betrayed before. I have abandonment issues. I learned this from my family. I have an anxious attachment style. I have been hurt before. All of those things can be true. They can explain you. They can give your behaviour context. They can even deserve compassion. But explanation cannot become exemption. Your history can explain why you struggle with something without giving you permission to keep hurting people with it. Understanding yourself should increase your responsibility, not reduce it, because once you know what you are capable of doing, you have less reason to pretend you didn’t know.

I think the same thing applies to love, perhaps more than anywhere else. Love is where all of our theories about ourselves get tested against another actual human being. You can have very strong beliefs about what relationships should look like. You can know your boundaries. You can know what you will and won’t tolerate. You can believe you are rational and independent and emotionally secure. Then you meet someone who matters to you, and suddenly you discover that knowing what you believe and being able to live according to it are two entirely different things. The person you become when you have something to lose can be very different from the person you imagined yourself to be when you had nothing at stake.

I was thinking about this when I received a submission recently from someone who asked to remain anonymous. Their understanding of relationships is very different from mine, and I want to be honest about that before I share their writing. They speak openly about non-monogamy, relationship anarchy and the ways they have questioned traditional ideas about what love and partnership are supposed to mean. Those aren’t something I personally use to understand my own relationships. I don’t think that needs to prevent me from listening to what they are actually trying to say. Sometimes another person’s conclusions can be different from yours while the emotional question underneath them still feels painfully familiar.

Their submission is about having what they describe as their first real crush. What interested me was not simply the fact that they had fallen for somebody. It was the level of awareness they had about their own experience. They could see themselves idealising this person. They could recognise their anxiety. They could identify the stories their mind was creating and question the expectations they had inherited about romance. They had spent time meditating, writing, reading and thinking about the mechanisms behind their own behaviour. They understood themselves remarkably well.

And they still couldn’t make the feeling disappear.

I think that is worth sitting with.

So, because they asked to remain anonymous, I am going to leave their name out and let them speak for themselves here.

THE ANONYMOUS WRITER’S SUBMISSION:

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crush crush crush.

the strange ways we love

I’ve realised recently that I’ve never had a real crush.

Not really.

Little school crushes on girl-friends, the cute guys on T.V. that my patriarchal conditioning prevented me from imagining, relationships that I slipped and fell into. Even my now spouse, the connection was instant and mutual.

I’m realising this, because I think I’m experiencing it now.

For real.

My partner and I have been on journeys of unlearning many of the scripts that we’ve acquired by existing in society. The non-consensually permeating ideas forced onto us from centuries.

In this queer exploration, we’ve opened ourselves to become non-monogamous, relationship anarchists.

And in this, in our travelling apart from one another, we’ve opened our hearts to some incredibly joyful, painful and profound experiences.

All of which I think we can call love.

My crush is an angel. She’s adorable, adventurous, innocent, wise and perfectly-imperfect. At least that’s what my brain tells me. It tells me “I know her, I see her for who she really is, and I love her”. And sometimes I believe it. Silly brain.

We met travelling, in one country, then another, and now another. I find myself continuously in positions as close to her as possible. Earlier on, this was a conscious choice. But as the reality of the hopelessness of this love sunk in, this has shifted to the unconscious. I only know that to be the case for myself, but I think (hope) this is true of her as well. There’s a weird ebb and flow that I’ve noticed throughout our time knowing each other, a pushing-and-pulling, a jumbled, confusing mess.

One day, we’ll be driving together on a motorbike for hours, listening and singing our little hearts out to boygenius, talking past midnight about anything and everything. We are in the moment, our hearts connecting in a profound way that I would call love. This satisfies my ego, and its delusions run wild.

The next day, I feel like me existing is hurting her.

Texting her, no answers, anxious notifications, heart skips, respond, repeat. As she distances herself, I try to pull in closer, trying to reclaim what happened before, to manifest the delusions into reality. And this kills my ego.

I retreat into myself, desperate to get a gauge of what the fuck is happening. I meditate, journal, write poetry. Or, in a hopeless bid to escape these feelings, I’ll go out, partying and living and adventuring. And yet, that ebb flows back to me, and I am reminded of her in one way or another. A glance at each other as we pass each other by on the road that sinks my heart. A stupid, drunk kiss with each other (it was only a kiss!), breaking me. Listening to her songs on repeat. I think I’d also call this love.

I completed a Vipassana retreat recently.

I’m also currently reading Love in a fcked up world.

Both emphasise the need for mindfulness, understanding the mechanisms that dictate our actions and reactions.

I’ve gotten really, really good at this.

In my interactions, I’ve become increasingly capable of recognising what’s happening through both a Buddhist and a materialist, politically informed lens.

Even with my crush, I can recognise the processes; ‘Thinking-liking’, ‘_anxiety‘ and ‘doubt‘. ‘Compulsory-monogamy ', ‘the romance myth‘ and ‘_idolising*’.

And yet they still happen anyways.

I’m sitting here in a cafe writing again, practicing the mantra “being friends with this person is just as valuable as crushing on them“. Knowing tomorrow will likely be the last day I see her for a long time. Knowing that the moments we’ve shared together, won’t disappear anymore than they have. The ones where we’ve shared the most intimate parts of ourselves with each other in the most loving, vulnerable and empathetic ways, and the ones where us being in the same country feels like it’s not enough distance to prevent us both suffocating. Thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh’s words.

“There are real, painful feelings, strong emotions, and troubling perceptions that agitate or make us afraid… we can spend time with these difficult feelings without running away. We can embrace them the way a parent embraces a child and say to them, “Darling, I am here for you; I have come back; I am going to take care of you”.

I’m sitting here, embracing the me who loves so unapologetically, who feels lonely and sad at the absence of physical touch. Who wishes for things like a child wishes for a pony. Who desires and fears human connection, who makes mistakes, over and over again. And I’m doing this while still listening to her music.

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What I found interesting about their piece wasn't whether I agreed with every idea in it. I don't think I need to agree with someone else's way of loving to recognise their struggle with love. There is a very human experience underneath their particular philosophy: the experience of knowing that your mind is doing something to you and still being unable to simply think your way out of it.

That feels much more honest to me than the version of growth we are usually sold.

Because sometimes you can know that your mind is making somebody larger than they really are and still be completely captivated by them. You can know that uncertainty is feeding your imagination and still hope that the thing you are imagining might become real. You can understand that another person is separate from the story you have created around them and still feel an ache when they move away from you. The knowledge doesn’t cancel the emotion. It simply changes your relationship with the emotion.

And maybe taking it back requires less wisdom than we think and more practice. There are a few things we can actually do when we catch ourselves falling into a pattern:

1. Pause before you act.
Give the feeling some time before turning it into a decision, or a message, or an accusation or a confrontation. You don’t have to solve something at the exact moment it starts hurting.

2. Separate what you feel from what you know.
A feeling can be completely real without the story attached to it being true. Ask yourself what actually happened, what you are assuming, and what you are afraid might be true.

3. Don’t seek immediate relief at someone else’s expense.
Sometimes the thing we call communication is really just anxiety looking for somewhere to go. Before asking another person to make you feel better, ask whether there is something you can sit with yourself first.

4. Create distance when you know you’re reactive.
Put the phone down. Go outside. Write it out. Sleep on it. Talk to someone who isn’t emotionally involved. You don’t need to disappear from your feelings; you just need enough space to stop acting from their most intense version.

5. Let the feeling exist without making it your identity.
Being jealous doesn’t make you a jealous person. Feeling insecure doesn’t make you weak. Wanting someone doesn’t mean you have to pursue them. An emotion is something you are experiencing, not a definition of who you are.

6. Take responsibility without turning it into shame.
You are allowed to have patterns you are still learning to control. What matters is whether you keep using those patterns as an excuse or whether you keep trying to respond differently.

None of this means becoming detached from yourself. It means becoming responsible for yourself. You don’t have to stop feeling deeply to become emotionally mature. You just have to learn that the intensity of a feeling does not give it authority over your behaviour.

Maybe that is what self-awareness is actually for. Not to make us people who never lose control, never become attached, never get jealous, never make mistakes or never hurt. It is to give us enough understanding to recognise ourselves in those moments and enough discipline to choose what happens next.

Because knowing yourself doesn’t save you from yourself. It simply gives you a better chance of not becoming the worst version of yourself every time you are overwhelmed.