Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. One of the reasons we avoid knowing ourselves is that there are sides of us that aren’t complimentary, that we'd rather ignore ( or, in modern psychological terms suppress).
Part of our job is to figure out who we are, and not be scared. In Rav Wolbe’s sefer Alei Shor (Volume 1, page 141), he describes this concept of knowing who you are and realizing what's going on inside of you- realizing, on one hand your great potential, and on the other hand seeing what he calls Neti’ot/ tendencies that might be negative, Negi’ot/ biases, and hashhata/almost perversion that are inside of us.
He says that when you finally start realizing these negative sides of you, it’s Yeridat Hagehinom B’Odenu Haim/Going into Gehinom when you're still alive.
We start out thinking that we are great Sadikim, or at least we’re somewhere in the middle. And then suddenly, we start discover that even the best of things we do stem from egoistic tendencies. There might even be real lowliness.
As David Hamelech says, Kol HaAdam Kozeb/ Man is totally false.
He says that knowing yourself means listening to conversation between two people, talking about you.
One is your friend and the other doesn't like you. The one that doesn't like you keeps on saying bad things, but as much as your friend tries to justify what you're doing, the enemy just pokes holes in it and finds problems with it. If you were listening to this conversation, what would your reaction be? Would y you be in shock from all the things that your enemy says? Would you be upset that he doesn't know your good qualities? Would you be depressed because you weren't portrayed in a better fashion? Someone who really knows himself would say, ‘Everything that my enemy said is true, nothing is new.
I know myself well. It does not come as a shock.’
That's what it means to truly know yourself.
But now, for the positive side: Rav Wolbe says that before a person really knows himself, he's living in the depths, but once you start to know yourself, you're out of the depths. The fact that you recognize your faults separates you from the evil.
Once you start saying, “I have this side of me, that might be capable of stealing,” and you’re aware of it, that makes it separate from you. Although it’s bad, it’s not you anymore, because you're no longer identifying yourself with those biases and negativity. The awareness itself separates you, even though it’s still working.
We have our true self, our Ani, our self-awareness that's above that.
So in a way, it might be depressing at first, but on the other side, it's liberating.
Rav Wolbe tells the following story to illustrate his point:
Many years ago (in the 1800s), there was a man (Kaspar Hauser) from Germany who lived trapped in a dungeon from birth through adolescence. He was fed in the dungeon, and didn’t see a person until his teens. He lived in total solitude. Later, he said that the entire time that he had lived in the basement, he thought life was the basement.
Once he realized that he had spent his life in the basement, he was already out of the basement.
As long as he was in the basement, that was his whole world.
And the same thing is true when you get to know yourself. When you were in the basement, living in your lower self with all your bad middot, that's the basement you're living in. That's all you know. Once you start realizing, Hey, I was in the basement, you're already out of the basement, and now your job begins- starting to fix yourself.