I'm Obsessed with Getting to Know Myself
And somehow I'm going to use Chat GPT for good and make it help.
The other night I realized I am obsessed with getting to know myself. I was on YouTube shorts (not a word about me being on YouTube shorts. I’m slowly battling my social media addiction. I started with TikTok (meth), went to Instagram Reels (cigarette), and now I’m on YouTube Shorts (nicotine patch). ANYWAY, I was on YouTube Shorts and a clip from Natural Habitat Shorts popped up. This channel posts little animated animal characters acting out their species’ obscure animal facts as if they were human. I love them. As I was watching that clip, I had that exact thought, “I love these.” As soon as I thought it, I went to my notes app, started a list titled, “Things about me” and wrote, “I love the Natural Habitat Shorts on YouTube”. Underneath that one, I quickly then wrote, “I am someone who has to make a list of things they love.”
Is that pathetic? Because let me tell you, after I wrote it, I felt pathetic hahaha. The worst part is, it’s not the first time I started a list like this. In my notes app exists other titles like, “What I Like to Do for Fun”, “Things That Inspire Me”, or “Observations About Myself”. The truth is written on the note’s app wall: I don’t know myself and wish I did. I wish I did because I think not knowing myself is making me a crappy person.
I came to this conclusion a couple of days after the notes incident. I was reading a post titled, “in defense of pretension” by the very pretentious and very insightful Ayan Artan. At first, I was in fact, annoyed by how pretentious she was being. The big words to flex her vocabulary or the name-dropping of niche books or poems to argue that we as a society have become far too tolerant of stupidity and far too critical of being educated irritated me. I was half ready to quit when she hit me with this banger:
“do you not get bored? does the ugliness of stupidity not scare you?”
It clicked right then are there. I wasn’t irritated because she was being pretentious, I was irritated because I was being jealous. I want to know big words that express exactly how I’m feeling. I want to know off the top of my head novels that changed me or a poem I love so much I memorized it. I want to collect books, movies, and artworks like little souvenirs of my time here on earth. Something that says, “I lived a life. A life I was fully engaged in. This is who I am and this is what I like”. I’m jealous because Aryan seems to have that. She knows herself and it makes me jealous because I can’t say the same. I would argue though, that it’s the ugliness of my ignorance, and not my stupidity, that scares me. I can learn these things. I can have everything I just described. I just haven’t done it, and time is running out. I project this feeling by being a hater, when in reality I have no one to blame but myself.
There’s a sob story somewhere about how the reason I haven’t beaten off my ignorance and found myself is because I wasn’t afforded the opportunity. Growing up gay in a Mormon family and community isn’t exactly what I’d call a conducive environment for exploring my interests or the world beyond what was deemed appropriate. It is, however, no excuse. No gay kid gets to leave growing up religious unscathed. All my dates with other gay Mormons frequently started with us trauma bonding over our shared experiences. Despite the shared circumstances, I can list several wonderful gay ex-Mormons who have a deep sense of self. What they lacked in opportunity they made up for in bravery.
It is precisely this lack of bravery and fear of judgment that’s caused me to put off getting to know myself. What if people find me tacky? Or corny? Or something so bad they have to make up a new word like cheugy? There is safety in not knowing anything about myself and having no opinions on anything. I feel no loyalty. I can become a reflection of whomever I am speaking with, which is the easiest way to keep the peace and feel like people “like” me. The cold hard truth is, they don’t like me. They like themselves. They don’t even know me. Why? BECAUSE I DON’T EVEN KNOW ME. But that’s about to change.
Because I am who I am, I’ve committed to two things to help me “know” myself:
Read all the books listed on the reading list that Chat GPT provided me when I gave it this prompt, “Create a reading schedule for me for the year 2025 that will culture me in art, philosophy, history, science, literature, and anything else imperative to a well-rounded education and the development of my mind. I’m a beginner so help me find where to start.” See the table at the end of this post if you’re curious what it spit out.
Commit to writing what I think I learned from each book and posting it on Substack.
The first one is straightforward enough. I need to expand my horizons and I know reading will help me do that. Chat GPT gives me a starting point, though I’ll admit it’s probably basic and imperfect.
The second one probably needs some explanation. Part of it is that writing is a way to keep me accountable and engaged in what I am reading. This explains the writing, but not necessarily the posting. The other part is that there is something incredibly alluring and terrifying about posting my thoughts online, where potentially anyone can see and make a judgment. It makes my heart beat fast and my palms get sweaty. Despite the anxiety, I am desperate to know what it feels like to be seen. Not some version of me that has been tailored to fit expectations, but the authentic version of me that has been unearthed through intentionally dedicated study, as if I were a statue waiting beneath the marble. There’s no promise that the statue waiting below will be some Michelangelo masterpiece, but at least it will finally exist, I will finally exist. It sounds melodramatic but it just feels like something I need to do.
So, there you have it. Add “wannabe Substack writer” right below “scared of the ugliness of my own ignorance” to my list of things about myself. Cheers to my first official post!
2025 Reading Schedule Courtesy of Chat GPT
January: Art
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich
February: Philosophy
“Sophie’s World” by Jostein Gaarder
“Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
March: History
“A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn
“Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond
April: Science
“A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking
“The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins
May: Literature
“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison
June: Interdisciplinary
“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari
“The Art of War” by Sun Tzu
July: Psychology and Sociology
“Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman
“The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg
August: Modern Issues
“The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein
“The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert
September: Creative Writing
“Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott
“The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard
October: World Cultures
“Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe
“The Book of Tea” by Okakura Kakuzo
November: Economics
“Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty
December: Reflection and Synthesis
“The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell
“The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White