Exploring self-awareness as a critical, underrated form of intelligence built from challenging oneself and calculating risk
By VIOLET ZANZOT— vmzanzot@ucdavis.edu
On my flight to London this past Saturday, I watched two movies, slept awkwardly and sat with my headphones on, staring at the flight tracker in an attempt to settle my nerves and ease my anticipation. About halfway through “Eat, Pray, Love,” I realized that Julia Roberts’ character and I are a lot alike: We both appreciate good food, are too pretty for our own good and are on journeys with ourselves which are motivated mainly by exposure therapy.
As a quintessential creature of habit who often finds herself in unknown environments, I have found that the juxtaposition of my comfort zone and lifestyle qualifies me to speak on the importance of trying new things.
Testing our limits every day is how we learn about ourselves and the world around us. Fears and discomforts, though often common between people, are defined only by our individual sentiments and should be explored. To avoid experiences out of fear of failure or embarrassment is to shortchange ourselves of valuable knowledge.
Self-awareness is one of the most underrated forms of intelligence; it is to recognize the nuances, subtleties and complexities of the relationships we have with ourselves. In this way, self-awareness is an ongoing process to understand why we are the way we are, how we operate in response to the world and how we can appreciate that the definitions and identities of things are ever-changing.
In challenging ourselves, we force confrontations — with ourselves. Choosing to embrace what we learn connects us to a deeper understanding of ourselves. For instance, I had a friend recently tell me she knew some of her feelings were irrational, and thus her boyfriend’s response to an argument was justifiable. She went on to explain that her prior life experiences had led her to have a tendency to overreact to things.
As I told her (and now you, with my only credentials being earned through lived experience and a few years studying social science), her awareness of herself not only allowed her to control her response to the situation, but to understand the issue from his perspective. Self-awareness and the power to control one’s own mind provides not only protection from the outside world, but also an ability to empathize and sympathize with others — a trait that is often lost when one can not even understand themselves.
Self-awareness, like many others, is a skill that is built on numerous encounters with cold, hard truths and often troubling realities. We can learn from the team that’s down in a match — the loser has several options: hail mary, play simple, accept defeat or strategize. When the final whistle blows, they’ll have learned something.
When we touch a hot stove, we learn it burns. When we face challenges, we learn how we react to them. We gain this invaluable skill — self-awareness — by consciously working our way through life and letting its challenges be lessons.
Moving to a school so far from home was terribly hard for me. I didn’t see the struggle coming, but apparently it’s not always easy to cope with being so far from everything I’ve ever known. I learned very quickly that the one person you can never escape is yourself. I learned a whole lot of other stuff too, but only because I first realized the most important relationship I needed to foster was the one I had with little old me. We are stuck together.
Often, I wondered why my life felt like nothing more than a never-ending series of exposure therapy sessions. Only from learning to appreciate the importance of this process did that pain alleviate. To know oneself is to understand the world — to calculate risks, to empathize, to understand one’s own position in a vast world and, of course, to be one’s own dinner date.
Written by: Violet Zanzot— vmzanzot@ucdavis.edu
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