i’m the kind of person who

adam phillips interview in the paris review (bolding my own):

PHILLIPS

It’s really showing you how much your wish to know yourself is a consequence of an anxiety state—and how it might be to live as yourself not knowing much about what’s going on.

INTERVIEWER

And how much perhaps you need to live that way, not knowing.

PHILLIPS

Or that there’s no other way to live. That’s what’s happening anyway, actually, but it’s concealed or covered up or assuaged partly by fantasies of knowing who we are. When people say, “I’m the kind of person who,” my heart always sinks. These are formulas, we’ve all got about ten formulas about who we are, what we like, the kind of people we like, all that stuff. The disparity between these phrases and how one experiences oneself minute by minute is ludicrous. It’s like the caption under a painting. You think, Well, yeah, I can see it’s called that. But you need to look at the picture.