One thing I was certain of growing up was that I, an imposingly tall and broad lad from provincial Cumbria, was different. I knew I was gay. In retrospect, I now recognise this moment as my first conscious engagement with philosophy, specifically, epistemology. How could I know I was gay? What does it mean to know something about myself? Could such self-knowledge be mistaken?

When I came out as a teenager, imposing and visibly adult, some of my peers refused to believe me. The lens they were given for recognising what a gay person ‘looked like’ excluded me. They treated stereotypes themselves as proof, and at times, their certainty called into question my own internal knowledge. There was a moment, fleeting, yet enduring, where their disbelief began to infiltrate my own thinking. If they could be so certain and still be mistaken, then who’s to say I wasn’t? What made my certainty any more justified than theirs? The certainty I thought I had wavered, not from within, but under the weight of external consensus. Just as a melody gains meaning only in relation to the notes around it, so too does knowing oneself emerge through interactions with the external. That kind of certainty pauses the growth of personal understanding, but in doing so, it forges a stronger, more resilient truth. My doubt was short-lived. When I examined it, it dissolved. My recognition of myself remained intact. This, too, was an encounter with epistemology: a moment in which knowledge became relational, negotiated, unstable, unsettled by an ontological confusion.

Years later, I encountered Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I was torn. Moved by its core epistemological claim but unsettled by the value-laden structure Plato builds. The binary of light and dark, enlightenment and ignorance, carries moral weight. The journey toward knowledge is framed as moral progress; those who remain in the cave are cast as deficient, pitiable, or hostile to truth. Whether this is a matter of translation or design, it enacts a philosophical hierarchy I find troubling. Must knowledge always promise liberation? Might there instead be meaning, if sometimes uncomfortable, in the fragile patterns we find in the chaos?

Despite its ideological baggage, the allegory remains compelling, functioning as a powerful exploration of the instability of perception and the constraints of the senses. This tension echoes centuries later in Descartes’ Meditations, which are themselves born of doubt. And yet, even Descartes slips: “I must remember that I am a man, and that consequently I am in the habit of sleeping.” In that moment, the illusion of unconditionally controlled thought falls away. Before we ask what knowledge is, we must first ask whether “knowledge” itself is iterable: does the term mean the same across contexts, or does it change, linguistically and conceptually, depending on speaker and frame?

Our minds didn’t evolve to find truth, but to find patterns, to make the world coherent enough to live in. We see things not in isolation but in relation: this resembles that, this feels unlike that. Meaning arrives through context, not in spite of it. We learn flexibly, interpret comparatively, and hold knowledge in ways that shift depending on where we’re standing. Knowing something, then, isn’t about having it in full. It’s about discerning a rhythm, even if it only makes sense from a certain stage, at a certain time.

Writers like Camus and Kafka help give shape to this kind of existential dissonance. Their work shows how the human drive to taxonomise reality often collapses under its own limitations. We construct meaning in the hope of taming chaos, but in doing so, we may obscure the fact that meaning itself is provisional. These texts are, to me, the acceptable face of something vast and unknowable; the literature of the absurd giving human shape to the ungraspable.

I find myself returning to the same kind of questions over and over… How many melodies must play at once before they lose themselves in the white noise?

Music offers an insightful analogy here. A melody or chord can arise from anywhere within the vast spectrum of frequencies, yet over time we have distilled these infinite possibilities into simpler, more pleasing, and repeatable structures. This filtering and organising mirrors how our minds, and cultures, make sense of the chaotic flood of experience they must navigate, forming patterns we can recognise, share, and iterate, sometimes giving meaning to them and other times resisting any meaning at all.

But does this refining make music simpler, more utilitarian, or does it introduce new layers of complexity? In narrowing the infinite range of sound into familiar melodies and chords, do we clarify experience, or do we complicate it, creating new ideas to master, new rules to observe, new conventions to follow at the risk of being perceived as unenlightened? These categories shape and limit what we perceive. And what of the sounds we leave behind, the frequencies we choose not to attend to? Perhaps it is worth asking why we disregard them, and what that selective hearing reveals about the boundaries of perception and understanding we inhabit.

As I often do, I return to the question of blame. While I may feel frustration, anger, or alienation from those who misunderstood or mistreated me, I struggle to place moral blame in any absolute sense. How can I hold someone responsible for the limits of what they’ve been taught and lived? We all reach for meaning in a world that rarely offers clear answers. It’s in that tension between our search and the world’s silence that the absurd lives. Seeing this doesn’t excuse harm, but it complicates blame. It reminds me that we’re all just trying to quiet the mind’s demand for certainty in a world that offers none.

Likewise, it would be futile to hold myself accountable for knowing, or not knowing, in any simple or absolute way. Just as I cannot fairly judge others without considering their limitations, I must acknowledge the constraints that shaped my own understanding. Responsibility for knowledge is always caught up in the contexts we inherit and inhabit, making self-judgment as complex and provisional as judging others.

I suppose this, in its own way, is a kind of philosophy. Or at least an attempt at it. Not the pursuit of answers, but the act of circling the same questions from different angles, hoping to get closer to something that feels honest. Philosophy, for me, is a form of humility: an acceptance that certainty is impossible, and that understanding grows through questioning, not knowing. Its methods remind me that this pursuit of self-reflection is not a mark of superiority or special worth. We all navigate uncertainty in our own ways, and that might just be enough.

So I’ll end where I began: I know I am gay. And yet, in the same breath, I’m not even sure there is anything to truly know at all. I don’t know whether the word ‘know’ means the same thing now as it did when I began this piece.