Learning yourself works like learning a city’s streets. Eventually you quit wandering into the same dead-end blocks.

Self-knowledge accumulates the way familiarity with a place does, slowly and mostly through repetition. You take a wrong turn several times before you start recognising it in advance, and eventually you know which routes lead nowhere without having to walk them again. Nobody learns a city from a map alone.

Notice the dead end you keep arriving at. Name it specifically, whether it is a kind of conversation, a decision you make when tired, or a person who always leaves you flat. Recognising the corner before you turn into it is the whole skill, and it comes from the repetitions.