What it really means to know yourself
A reflective and introspective series on exploring identity, self-discovery, and the lifelong journey of knowing ourselves.
Chapter 2: The Illusion of Knowing Yourself
This article is part if the series What It Really Means to Know Yourself, where I explore the experiences, questions, and reflections that shaped my understanding of identity and self discovery. While this story is deeply personal, my hope is that it encourages you to reflect on your own journey as well.
All my experiences in the early stages of my life (ages 12-20) influenced how I interacted with the outside world. If so much of who I was came from external influences, did I actually know myself at all?
My family taught me how to be nice, to respect adults and elders, not to talk back to adults, to dress modestly, to know how to cook and clean - for my future husband - something especially emphasized by Grandma. On the other hand, my mom was heavily oriented towards education and faith. As a result, I understood very early that being an excellent student was not an option but a must. Prioritizing school was always a recurring theme at home, along with serving and fearing God. I take pride in acknowledging that I inherited strong values from my family: respect, faith, excellence, justice, and the importance of family. I turned out to be an overly respectful and nice young woman.
I was trying to be very good at everything people expected of me. Especially as the daughter of a diplomat and politician (Dad, may his soul rest peacefully), and of a preacher and lawyer (Mom). The pressure seemed to come from everywhere. Let’s start with the family expectations interconnected with the religious, moral and mental burdens I was carrying without even realizing it at times.
My grandma would never miss a chance to praise my dad and remind me and my siblings that we had to be exemplary with phrases like, “Your dad was not just anyone!”, or “You must not act like everybody else, you are from a respectable family”. I started identifying myself as some kind of special person coming from a good family, with the privilege of having God on my side, old royal ancestry blood and being the daughter of a diplomat- even though we were not necessarily benefiting or receiving any privileges linked to any titles associated with my family - while living in the Parisian suburbs. At least that was my impression until I figured out later on, long after graduating from university, that my family dynamic and history were much more complicated than that.
I was constantly monitoring how I was behaving in public, how I was dressing, even my thoughts couldn’t escape the tribunal of appearances. I can characterize this type of pressure as a feeling of constant anxiety. This feeling was triggered when I had to make decisions, or when I would have to take a step that would make me deviate even slightly, from the strict family and pious image that seemed to pave my life trajectory. It lived rent-free inside my psyche. It went from my choice of clothes to my activities or my outings. Even during family or church gatherings I would have to evaluate the risk ratio of each of my actions. What would people say if I took a glass of wine? What would the church folk say if they saw me dressed like this? How would my family react if I told them I was going to Kizomba dance classes? It was always about “people’s” perception, rarely was it genuinely about pleasing God or about myself. All my questions were oriented outward instead of inward. At that time, I operated from a place of pleasing and conforming to my social circle. I was masking in the name of Jesus, belonging and fear.
All my relationships were hidden. Because I can’t introduce a man into my family if I know he’s not going to be the one. All my mistakes, my heartbreaks, my moments of darkness were hidden from my family and sometimes even from my friends. I was neither prepared nor ready to be judged, to be crucified on the public stage. That’s when another dimension of conditioning came into play: trauma. At the time, I was not yet aware that some of my experiences and patterns of action and thought were rooted in repressed traumatic experiences.
All this social conditioning, along with cultural and religious expectations and my desire to belong, led fear to become part of my overall operating system. Fear of rejection, fear of being judged or reprimanded. Fear of not doing enough, not being enough. As a result, I began having difficulty expressing myself and handling adversity or confrontation. I became an expert at masking, hiding, selectively disclosing information, and suppressing my own internal voice and opinions. Sadly, my ability to connect with people in general also drastically decreased over time. For this last part, I could actually point to other factors, but I’ll stick to this for now.
When I started university, I began to recognize my own duality for what it was: the result of my upbringing coming into direct conflict with my internal desires, ideas and voice. I was becoming more aware of my sense of self but I was still very attached to the rules I had set for myself based on my education and my religion.
I remember that, throughout my teenage years, I held strong beliefs and standards for myself such as “I can’t fail”, “I don’t have room for mistakes”. The pressure led me to become very self-critical, perfectionistic and unable to celebrate my own successes, big or small. It was only later in life - not too long ago - that I realized how powerful our own inner world. We have the capacity to influence our reality for better or for worse, through a combination of three elements: our thoughts, our words, and our actions.
Before you continue to the next chapter, take a moment to reflect.
What shaped the person you believed yourself to be?
Which influences still feel aligned with who you are today ?
Which ones are ready to be questioned?
Sometimes the first step towards knowing ourselves isn’t finding new answers, it’s equally if not more important to become aware of the questions we never asked