A Meditation on Being Known

So let’s begin with something out of left field: I am a big fan of Steph Curry, and the Golden State Warriors. Out of left field because I’m one of the least sporty humans I know. I wish that I was kidding. With regards to the NBA, I rode the global Michael Jordan era NBA mania on a casual FOMU wave that flattened after his first retirement. I hardly registered his second stint. Then one day, about a decade ago, I read a longform article about Steph Curry. The unlikeliness and inevitability of his story reeled me in. I was hooked.

I became a fan and began to follow the Warriors with avid interest. I had always had it in mind to one day make the obligatory Warriors’ fan pilgrimage to Chase Center in San Francisco to watch them in action but no matter how many times I found myself in California, I was unable to make it work. Then in 2024 I got it into my head that if I didn’t tick this item off my list soon, Curry would retire before I actually got to see him play in person. With a renewed sense of urgency I plotted and calculated until things finally clicked. On my way to a conference in Mexico, I would detour via Houston to watch the Warriors play.

Best. Time. Ever. It didn’t matter that I was seated in the middle of a Houston Rockets crowd while loudly cheering on the Warriors and catching a decent amount of stank eye for it. It didn’t even matter that Steph didn’t play in the game: he put on his usual pre-game exhibition for his fans and that was enough.

I posted my (poorly composed, sorry) photos from that adventure on Instagram and headed off to Mexico. Then came the puzzled private pings. You went to see who play what where? When did you start to pay attention to the NBA? Etcetera.

I had thrown those who thought they knew me for a loop. Turns out being an ardent Steph Curry fan wasn’t one of those things I wore on my lapel. None of the people who carry my stories, the people who remind me who I am when I forget, knew. Not one.

Yet it wasn’t something that I set out to hide. It just so happens, I suppose, that I am not proselytic when it comes to my interests. Often, rather than recruiting those around me and persuading them to come along, I look for people who are already immersed in those interests and jump in with them.

But this brought home to me again how much it takes to be known fully by our nearest and dearest, and to know them in turn. Especially if we don’t live with them. Because physical proximity helps us stumble upon random things about a person. If we live with others, we have built in witnesses to our lives, for better or for worse. If you are like me and have lived alone for more than three decades, it’s more complicated.

I read an article about VS Naipaul many years ago that made an impression. A scathing biography about him had just been released. Patrick French, the author, had demanded and obtained unprecedented access to all of Naipaul’s private journals and correspondence. He also had access to Naipaul’s wife’s diary. He spent countless hours over multiple years grilling Naipaul. He had, by all accounts, completely unrestricted access to the author’s life.

The result, The World is What it is, an authorised biography, was highly lauded when it first came out. Sam Anderson of the New York Magazine described it as perhaps the most shockingly authorised biography in the history of authorised biographies. Shockingly authorised, it turns out, because of the way it showed Naipaul in unflattering light. For example it exposed all the ways in which he was verbally abusive, flagrantly unfaithful and exceedingly cruel to his faithful first wife. It laid bare how he regularly visited prostitutes and physically abused the mistress he kept for a quarter of a century. It confirmed the niggling suspicion that, despite his own humble beginnings, he was a rabid and unrepentant racist and classist.

What was remarkable to me was that Naipaul treated this unflattering exposure with nonchalance. A shrug and an okay. He wasn’t thrilled with it, per se, but he was happy it was out there, he said, because people got to see him as he was before he died. He got to be known. If you came to the conclusion, after knowing him, that he was a narcissistic misanthrope, so be it. He wanted his monument built while he was still alive, as George Packer put it.

Frankly, this makes me squirm. Because no, I don’t want all my foibles and failings on full display in public. Sorry. There are parts of myself that I can only entrust to my people and I’m certain I do not want to broadcast them to the whole world. Maybe I’m not as evolved as Naipaul yet. Maybe I should hold off on writing a memoir.

I heard Salman Rushdie say something in the same vein to Ezra Klein as they discussed his autobiographical memoir Knife. That the principle of the autobiographical memoir is to tell as much truth as possible. If you’re not going to tell the whole naked unvarnished truth, then don’t write the book, he said.

What both men are saying, quite rightly, is that if you want to be known, lay all sides of yourself bare. That’s the only way.

The problem is, to be known is not necessarily to be understood. Nor to be liked. Therein lies the risk. Sometimes we pull back the curtain on who we are and people just don’t like what they see. It seems to me, though, far better to be disliked because of who you really are rather than liked because people think you’re someone you’re not. Henrik Karlsson of Escaping Flatland has a brilliant piece of advice: show the inside of your head in public, he says, so people can see if they would like to live in there.

I heartily agree. We should frontload our quirkinesses and our oddities. Not necessarily flood the streets, but make sure they fall like a steady rain so that someone who can’t stand it will reach for an umbrella. It will save everybody a great deal of time.

Frida Kahlo points out the distinction between those who love us and those who don’t.

Those who love us, she says, see us with their hearts and give us qualities beyond the ones we truly have. And those who refuse to love us can never be satisfied with all our efforts. What’s interesting is that in both these versions of us, we’re not really being seen in the raw. In one version, we are loved and therefore we are backgrounded by a beautiful blue sky, rolling hills, a rainbow maybe. In the other version, our very presence and our every step is stalked by ominous mood music. It’s a version of us at the core of both frames, but we present differently, depending on who is looking at us, and in the end, it is not all of us exactly as we are.

In the movie Shall We Dance, Susan Sarandon’s character is asked why people get married. Because we need a witness to our lives, she says. I have carried that one line with me through the years although I could not for the life of me tell you what the movie is about, whether I watched it to the end or indeed anything else that happens in it. It’s a powerful line. Perhaps more poignant for me for having lived my entire adult life as a single woman. The point is the witness sees something, and therefore knows something and maybe that makes it, and us, a little more real.

It’s why Tauren Wells’ Known is a balm for the soul: It’s both hard truth and ridiculous grace, he sings, I’m fully known and loved by You. God’s most consequential promise is I know you fully and I love you completely.

Sometimes we don’t know ourselves. Or perhaps we don’t want to know ourselves. We look in the mirror and we do not like what we see, so we close our eyes and pretend. Other times our eyes are wide open, and yet.

Remember when Elizabeth Bennet read Mr Darcy’s letter after she had turned down his proposal? She was reluctant to accept his version of events at the first reading. And then she read the letter again and the scales over her eyes began to fall off and it soon became clear to her that she, who prided herself in her sound judgement, had fallen into deceit. At the height of her embarrassment about how she had been mistaken, she exclaims in despair, Till this moment, I never knew myself! Her trust in herself is shaken to the core as she comes to the realisation that everything she believed to be true about the situation up to that very moment was in fact the very opposite of true.

To have faith in one’s own judgement and then come to such a moment can be deeply rattling and profoundly humbling. It is also getting to know oneself better.

But Oswald Chambers wants us to get rid of the idea that we understand ourselves. Only God understands us, he says. He calls it the last bit of conceitedness to go. Am I then really all that which other men tell of, Bonhoeffer writes from prison, or am I only what I know of myself? He lingers long in that uncertain place, between how others perceive him and who he understands himself to be.

If we are always becoming, then knowing ourselves and being known by others has to happen in the present continuous tense too, I suppose, unfolding right alongside who we are. Which is why it makes sense that only God, situated outside of time, can truly know us.

May you experience the unparalleled intimacy of being understood by someone who cherishes you.