To Know Oneself

     In the tale and tragedy of Oedipus Rex, or hero exemplifies the dilemma of self-discovery. There is first a great yearning for self knowledge, and then a great regret and horror after such a discovery. I'm sure Oedipus would have rather lived on in ignorance. But would that have whisked his problems away? He still would have married his mother and have already killed his father. Ignorance is bliss, but is living in bliss really the answer? Or must we confront our truth and suffer under it. If we yearn for ignorance we are rendering ourselves weak, taking away our agency in our lives.

    To know oneself really is a virtue that we must all strive towards, because it shows that we have taken full agency of ourselves in our lives. It shows that we refuse to live on the easy path of ignorance and acknowledge the consequences of our selfish and fearful actions. When I was reading the novel "Dune" something stuck out to me that I recall now. It was after a test where our main character was forced to endure insurmountable levels of pain with the threat of death if he quit the test early. He asked for an explanation and the proctor told him "We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans. // Our test is crisis and observation." I hold to a firm belief that in the real world we all have to discover the human within us outside of the animal. A creature with agency and the ability to face their duty to themselves. We are all born with the choice of either living in fear and timidity from the reality of our world or confront it with all of its claws and pain. Oedipus shows those claws and that pain like never before. The horror of reality can really put a damper on things, can't it? Yet we still need to know ourselves. Or else are we really humans, or just people?

    To know oneself is to know one's weaknesses. A part of that fiery pain that reality offers. A look on our failings. My own weakness is most likely derived from sloth. Unproductivity, procrastination, laziness, however you want to call it, it is something that cripples me in a lot of what I do. The difficulty it takes to move and take action when I don't specifically need to is almost overwhelming sometimes. I find myself relying solely on surges of inspiration to do productive things sometimes, and it really feels debilitating.

    But alongside that pain of reality, there is a silver lining. For Oedipus, it was the ability to stop doing what he was doing. A hair thin silver lining, but a lining nonetheless. For me, it was the realization of my own strengths. I have come to understand that I am a very creative person, especially when it comes to storytelling. Something that has always been a pleasure has been reading fantasy and science fiction books, and exploring the new worlds they bring me. They fuel my creative spark that allows me to find joy in creating worlds and stories of my own through my own writing. I have movies going on in my head of my own making most of the time during the day.

    Being asked about your strengths and your weaknesses is certainly a daunting question, and I personally feel that this is the central idea of discovering and knowing oneself. So I feel that these are questions that everybody needs to answer about themselves. I am proud of my strengths and horribly ashamed of my weaknesses. When it comes to putting ourselves in perspective, for better or for worse, what helps is to think about how common this is. There are kids my age who excel at productivity but are struggling to cultivate imagination. There are kids with problems that are worse than the worst thing I could imagine. This is the human condition. We are all sifting our humanity from ourselves.