When I went home after my first year, someone I had known for years asked me a deceptively simple question: “Who are you?” I answered the way most people would: generically listing what I love, what I do, what I study. “I’m Camila. I love music, nature, running. I enjoy learning about philosophy.” He paused, unimpressed. “I asked who you are, not what you like or do.” I have yet to find a satisfactory answer to the question and in a lifetime’s worth quest for self-awareness, I’ve started to doubt whether that is a worthy goal in the first place.

Self-awareness is double-edged: The more self-aware I try to be, the less certain I feel about who I actually am. There is something inherently reductive about believing you could ever fully describe and know yourself. I like to believe that I am, at least somewhat, different from what I perceive myself to be, perhaps even more than it. That my being itself extends beyond the limits of my awareness; beyond anything I could ever articulate or understand. There is wonder and beauty in the possibility of surprising myself, of acting in ways I never thought I was capable of, of stepping outside the patterns I’ve come to expect and exiting the sphere of the ordinary. The moment you define who you are, there’s a subtle pressure to remain consistent with that version of yourself, to live up to an identity you’ve reduced to words in spite of the infinite nature of identity itself.

But even if self-awareness is a goal worth pursuing, who’s to say it’s even within reach? Any attempt to know myself is filtered through the same lenses I’m trying to understand. While some degree of self-knowledge is possible, that knowledge is always partial to the perspective that produced it. We’re stuck in the infinite loop of only ever being able to perceive a reflection of who we are through the same eyes that created said reflection in the first place. The paradox of self-awareness is that it requires a degree of disassociation from the self that is almost impossible to achieve. When someone describes you in ways you’d never describe yourself, you don’t have complete authority to refute it, so it’s worth letting your self-awareness be informed by how others see you. Yet outsourcing self-knowledge altogether to rely on how others know you isn’t the answer either. Self-awareness, for all its limits, is built upon the most intimate array of knowledge of oneself, and yet it still fails to represent the whole.

What begins as self-awareness can easily slip into self-consciousness. Complete faith in the way you perceive yourself can lead to a hyperawareness of strengths and flaws built on assumptions that may not even be true. With reflection and experience as the basis of self-awareness, you risk turning life into a constant scrutiny of your actions against the person you perceive yourself to be and how that compares to the person you wish to become. The more intensely you try to know yourself, the harder it becomes to be different from who you’ve already decided you are. There is something both peaceful and daunting in accepting how little we can truly know about ourselves.

And yet, abandoning self-awareness isn’t an option either. Without it, there is no growth nor accountability. The absence of self-awareness is blindness, while its excess is paralysis. To approximate who we are, we rely on imperfect tools: our interests, our habits, the ways others perceive us. I don’t know a better way to describe oneself than through hobbies, likes and dislikes, but maybe “Who are you?” is the wrong question to begin with. The pursuit of self-awareness isn’t just impossible but limiting, reducing the self to the confines of its own perception. Liberating ourselves from our obsession with self-knowledge is the first step toward becoming who we are.