Self-knowledge was important to me in my younger days, you know all the cliches, know thyself, to thine own self be true, I strove for that self-knowledge without fully understanding what it could possibly even be. It seemed important, but how to get to know myself? The self I saw was what was reflected back to me through the eyes and expressions of others. It was what people told me. “She is the easiest of my children” my mother once told her sister, “she just takes care of herself, never seems to be at a loss about what to do.” So that is who I am, I thought, someone who can take care of herself. This seemed true, but was it really self-knowledge? Wasn’t there something deeper? I searched, in books, in lectures, in music, to see more of myself reflected. Because I loved emotional music (blues, opera) did that make me an emotional person? It didn’t seem so. Because I loved science fiction, did that mean that I was from another world? This seemed more plausible; and yet, in all the years of schooling and working, I never felt that I was true to myself. I was pretty sure I had pulled one over on everybody. The University of Colorado gave me a bachelor’s degree, but only because I fooled them. I felt the same way about my PhD, my job at Cornell University, and later at a private research institute, then at Penn State. I was very good at fooling people, but who was I really? A few years ago I went to a talk by a woman who was an astronaut and a microbiologist. A young woman in the audience asked her if she had struggled with imposter syndrome, and how she had learned to deal with it. I had never heard the term before, but finally after all the years of my successful career I found my self-knowledge: I was an imposter!

These days I seek a different kind of self-knowledge, or perhaps it is anti-self-knowledge, a letting go of self-knowledge entirely, a returning to the innocent place, to the eternal place, to place of knowing nothing.