I’m Still Discovering Myself—You Don’t Know Me

There’s a phrase people use so easily that it almost slips by unnoticed: “I know you.”

It’s meant to be comforting, a way to say I see you, I understand you, you’re familiar to me. But whenever I hear it, something in my body resists. Those words don’t land lightly — they press against something deeper, something more complicated.

Because the truth is, nobody truly knows me. And I don’t truly know them.

We may know things about each other — details, habits, preferences, stories we’ve shared. We might know how someone takes their coffee, what makes them laugh, or the names of their childhood pets. But to know someone — in the deepest, truest sense — would require knowing how they feel from the inside. It would mean understanding the invisible weight they carry, the thousands of moments that shaped them, the quiet thoughts that never make it into words. And that kind of knowing is impossible.

When someone says, “I know you,” my mind flashes through a thousand images they’ve never seen. Memories they don’t know exist. Private heartbreaks. Unspoken dreams. Versions of me that lived and disappeared before they ever met me. How could anyone claim to know all of that?

To truly know someone would be to know how they feel — the precise texture of their sorrow, the flavor of their joy, the weight of their silence. And that is something we can never fully hold. We can listen. We can witness. We can offer compassion born from our own pain. But even when we say, “I know how you feel,” what we really mean is, “I’ve felt something that rhymes with your experience.” Never the exact same thing.

Even more than that — how could anyone truly know me when I am still discovering myself? Every day, I learn something new about who I am, what I believe, how I want to show up in this world. I am constantly changing, growing, unfolding. If I am still meeting new parts of myself, then how could anyone else possibly keep up?

I think most people say “I know you” with good intentions. It’s often just another way of saying I care about you or I see you. And I appreciate that — I really do. But language matters. Words shape how we relate to each other, and for me, those words carry a weight I can’t ignore.

Maybe instead of saying “I know you,” we could say, “I’m learning you.” Or, “I want to understand you more.” Maybe we could acknowledge that every person is a living story still being written — and that the best we can do is keep reading with curiosity, without assuming we’ve already reached the final page.

The truth is, we will never fully know one another. And maybe that’s not a flaw — maybe that’s what keeps relationships alive. We get to keep discovering. We get to keep unfolding. We get to keep being surprised by the depth of the people we love.

And in that endless becoming — both of ourselves and of each other — maybe we find something even more meaningful than knowing: we find connection.