enneagram

The world is full of considerations such as how you want to express yourself, who you want to surround yourself with, and what choices you make to feel most authentic. The other day, I retook my Enneagram and discovered my dominant type moved from 6 to 4. The results, I would say, were surprisingly accurate and insightful.

As an Ennea 4 you tend to romanticise life and love, leading you to idealise things that are beyond your grasp. This may be evident as yearning for unattainable love interests, desiring meaning and fulfilment that you’re not feeling right now or a tendency to compare yourself with others and what they have. [] This creates a sense that others have something that you are missing in your life or that something you had before in your life is missing at present. It may also lead you to cling to frustrating relationships.

I write about that very frequently as the concept of negativity collapse, where you are exposed to a part of yourself that you are missing by other people, particularly through limerence, and you spend the rest of your life trying to fill that void. I never knew it could be so easily described in a personality inventory. But I suppose that makes sense. A key attribute of 4s is that they tend to dramatize very simple things.

Lately, I’ve had a new way of understanding my relation to my emotions. The things I feel are feelings, which should be self-explanatory, but I never thought of them as such. I learned a couple years ago that feelings can be boiled down into neurochemistry and nothing else. Even the emotions that I feel like are magical, like euphoria or awe. There is little about these emotions that exists outside of the neurochemistry, which can be replicated through inorganic means. For a time, I found that distressing because I was under the impression that because they were neurochemistry that they were not real. But now I am more okay with the fact that the lack of a distinct, non-physical property to emotions.

My enneagram recommends me to create more distance between me and my emotions. I found this interesting because I never considered myself to be an emotional person, but I guess my actions say that I am. In context of all the art I have created, it makes a lot of sense. Who makes art when they are not emotional? It’s interesting because I tend to think of myself as a very rational person, but I can understand that I probably come across as someone who is very intense and moody. That’s probably my INTJ-ness showing.