Digging to get to the center of ourselves

I’ve realized recently that self-evaluation is a really interesting thing.

We all utilize it, whether it’s in small increments throughout our day or at pivotal moments in our lives. It blocks out this hindering need for consistency and embraces the idea of change. It provides us with a microscope to discover things about ourselves and gives us a telescope to see the bigger picture.

But I’ve realized recently that it’s really hard to evaluate yourself honestly.

It’s hard to evaluate yourself honestly in moments that challenge your own authenticity or in situations that involve people you love. It’s hard to own up to intentions you wish you didn’t have or to take your own mistakes with a grain of salt. And it’s really difficult to do it at a time when your life feels like it’s about to tip at a certain direction from the culmination of who you are.

For the last 21 years of my life — our lives — we’ve been taught to review literary texts, challenge research methods, investigate theories and cross-examine biases. Is Don Quixote a text about the Inquisition? Is there a third variable involved? What’s the direction of causality? What are the pros and cons of John Stuart Mill’s idea of utilitarianism?

Every day we’re asked to evaluate the world and its contents from different perspectives in the most truthful way that we can in order to find the most honest explanation.

For the last 21 years of my life, I’ve been walking around this world in the context of myself, using these tools subconsciously to grow into the honest explanation of who I am.

But have I done it truthfully? Right now in this crucial moment between what feels like a quickly receding life — college — and the steps to a new one — the real world — I’m beginning to question if I’ve ever really evaluated myself honestly. Do I erase my pages and start anew? But what if I have been honest? Are these questions themselves evidence that I don’t know myself, or that I know myself too well?

It’s a circle. It’s back and forth. It’s 45 degrees to the left and all the colors at once.

What’s scary about digging so deep is that you might find something you don’t like. That I might not be the person I thought I was. That I really am capricious and get caught up in things too easily. Evaluating quickly turns into scrutinizing. You become so adamant on your quest for genuineness and nothing else that you end up only seeing the world’s residue in your reflection.

To be honest, it’s two parts exhausting, one part distressing and all parts terrifying.

I really do believe we should do things that scare us, if not every day then frequently enough so that we’re never static — so we realize what we’re capable of and who we’re capable of being.

And right now, evaluating myself honestly is a really, really scary thing.

But I’m taking small steps. I’m careful in my digging, although my back aches and my hands are blistered. I want to be as authentic as I can not just for myself but for the people I love and for the things I do.

It’s humbling in a harrowing way. It’s not positive and it’s not negative. It’s not an end to a process because there’s no end to this process. I’m digging a hole that keeps getting filled with dirt and that only leads back up to where I’m standing, shovel in hand and gasping.

This past Sunday I went vertical cave climbing for the first time. I had gone horizontal caving once before but was unsure as to what vertical caving entailed. I’m terrified of heights. I have never belayed or rappelled or ascended anything before. At one point, we had to ascend a 50-foot cliff in the middle of the cave.

Halfway up, right before the hardest cliff edge, my ascender got stuck. I was shaking and petrified.

But in those minutes when I was stuck, when I didn’t know which direction to go or what to do, I realized that even if I had to go back down and start over or climb the rope using my hands, I was there — I was hanging in the center of a cave doing something terrifying with only equally terrifying options at my disposal. But I was there, in the center of it.

It’s important to dig. It’s important to know yourself beyond the dirt at the surface, even if underneath is filled with worms and muddled roots. It’s important to dig that hole even when the dirt piles up and you have to start again; even if you end up losing your shovel and have to dig with your hands.

It’s important to be there. To be in the center. To be in the center of “who I am.”