not knowing
I have a part of me that shudders and cringes whenever I find myself judging someone for not knowing something. I cringe because other parts of me know the truth- that to know anything is to have had a mere chance encounter with it.
You know how to use a hammer because your dad built a treehouse with you when you were 12. I still don’t know how to cook meat because my mother is a stunning cook who happens to lack a desire to teach. You’re judging me now probably. That’s okay. That’s the point of this essay. We often find ourselves policing each other on what we have encountered in our lives, the data we are or are not familiar with, the things we’re supposed to just know.
This tendency isn’t new, and certaintly didn’t start with social media. Ayanda Stood writes, “In the western imagination, it is not knowledge itself that is necessarily glorified — but a particular kind of it that seeks to make obvious and necessary things like hierarchy, war, power, and competition.”
The parts of us that police, sneer, and laugh at others —you guessed it, you therapy-goer, you— are our own internal critics projecting outward. These are the shadowy parts of us that learned specific ideas about intelligence and worth from Western standards. You weren’t born with an innate set of criteria to diagnose others as stupid.
If we haven’t naturally encountered certain information, the next best option is to be open to exploring and discovering it for ourselves. Yet, living in this capitalistic system often leaves us with a time famine, making it difficult to pursue learning opportunities. We simply don’t have the time to learn, and who’s fault is that?
Also, let us kindly remind those one-up parts of us- how would one know what one… does not know? How would you know, before the sting of embarrassment, that your school system failed you in some crucial way? That you never were taught by your 8th grade gym/health teacher that a clitoris is not, in fact, just that lovely external button, but contains internal tissue and 4,000 more nerve endings than a penis? Or that it exists as a part of the vulva.. not the vagina (that is just the hole, my friends).
I’m reminded of a crucial childhood lesson punctuated by overpriced dolls and tea. When I was 7 years old, little me pressed the red button on an escalator handrail at the American Girl Doll Store. The escalator stopped, alarms blared, and I was met with a look of searing disgust and a harsh grip on my wrist. The overwhelming feeling of incompetence I experienced didn’t make sense for a child, especially one without a fully developed prefrontal cortex. I was drawn to the mystery of the button- something both reachable and my favorite color at the time. DiDn’t yOu KnoW whAt wOulD hAppEn WheN yOu Did tHaT? Nope. I had never pressed a red button before. Now I never will again. That is learning! It’s loud and messy. It is definitely not graceful, nor does it have to be.
I find myself resenting how society treats children, especially in a world obsessed with knowledge. Our systems often disrespect children, who live in a state of constant not-knowing. We find them charming, giggling at their not-knowing, think of them as less-than and incapable, all while they’re the ones who actually have it right.
Their very not-knowing helps tether them to the present moment. It’s why they’re infatuated with blades of grass, trip over themselves to stare at clouds, and spend hours contemplating the water in the toilet. Put a toddler in a smoothie shop, and they’re in heaven. The colors, the textures, the ~options~. Put an adult in the same place, and they’re likely disconnected from their body, rushing through those abundant choices, stuck on autopilot, consumed with matters like protein intake. Because it is something known to them- they’ve been there enough times to make the mistake of assuming they do not need to re-know the smoothie-building process. I think we can learn a lot by watching the children near us… go about the world, not knowing.
We get to seek out knowledge.
We get to welcome knowledge, when it arrives, with open arms.
We get to acknowledge the impact of our not-knowing prior.
We get to not know sometimes.
