Knowing

This story was submitted anonymously to the How We Show Up collection as part of the July SEEQ sessions.

As humans, we’re driven to learn, to explore, to grow. And we’re drawn to increase the tally of things we know– about the world, about others, and about ourselves. We’re also egocentric little fuckers, so we tend to start with ourselves: What are the things we know to be true, almost from the beginning about ourselves and who we are? Let’s take stock of those things, and since I’m one of the aforementioned egocentric little fuckers, I’ll start with a handful of the earliest “facts” I came to “know” about myself: I know I’m a girl. I know I have a family. I know my name. Along the way, I’ve added a few details to this knowledge base: I know I like vegetables but not black-eyed peas, unless they are the kind that shake it like a Polaroid Picture. I know I like to be by myself, but I don’t like to be alone. I know I’m drawn to take risks, accept challenges, and try to fix brokenness. I know that I fail at all of these things more often than I succeed. I know I’m athletic but not Olympian, and if there’s a ball involved I become the opposite of athletic. I know that for me, tequila is only a good idea at the time. Like anything, as we add to the bank of what we have, whether that’s cash, cows, status, or knowledge, our confidence and power grows. So as we learn about ourselves and how we fit in to our world, it makes sense that we should grow up to be increasingly more confident and true-to-self with each thing that we add to our self-knowledge bank. But what happens when we lose one of the foundational truths upon which our definition of self has been built? What happens when we no longer know the things about ourselves that we have always known? In 2009, I stopped knowing my name. I’ll skip the juicy bits and get to the punchline: The name I’d known for 30 years changed as I said “I do” and “I will…(change my name to yours, asshole.)” I bet you can fill in the gap between then and now. So cut to now: It’s 2019 and I still don’t know my name. But for the first time ever in my life, I know that “I don’t know” is the real power. Because I don’t have to know what is. I only have to know what can be, and what I’ve learned about myself is that the answer to that is “anything I want to.” Authenticity is about truth. Truth is about knowing. And yet, at our most authentic, we don’t know anything, let alone what is true.