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It's been very hard to get anything typed lately, maybe because I don't get a lot of typing time to myself-- COMPUTER time, yes, but only enough to check things in short bursts, while people are running around demanding my attention or just distracting me. THAT LAST SENTENCE, for example, has taken 45 minutes to type, what with the kids deciding naptime was over and I needed to be talked to, and their dad coming home and attempting to get them to clean up their mess, and them arguing about how they COULDN'T POSSIBLY clean up their mess, and him coaching them step by step on cleaning up their mess, and now they're in here alone chanting "I'M TOO TIRED TO PICK UP!"
--Later, they've gone out to the sandbox and J is busy with his own stuff: RIGHT, so as I was saying, it's DANG hard to compose anything on the computer (I have a LITTLE more luck on paper, because I can do that in a broader variety of locations and don't feel as guilty for spending time on it), which may explain why I haven't posted in forever. Or, many other reasons, about all of which I'll hit on in the following post.
Anyway, one of my teammate-friends on the Lycoris project (which, by the way, another of my letters is up on the Tumblr, in case you only like to read stuff I write-- by the way, "Busy Writing Letters" is Excuse #2 For Why I Haven't Blogged) sent me this link to a personality test a few weeks ago. Now, I love me a good personality test-- not the random-generator ones, but actual personality tests (similar to how I loved blog surveys back when that was a thing), so, sure, I gobbled it up right away. And I followed the directions and read the descriptions of all the types, or at least the types I'd scored highly on (I nearly had a three-way tie), just to be sure.
But I only HAD to read the description of Type 9, my top score by one point, after all. Well, I DID read the others to be sure, to discount the possibility that this was just the sort of general description that could apply to almost anyone, like fortune cookie fortunes and horoscopes and such, but there was NO QUESTION about it. That was the most FREAKISHLY ACCURATE personality test result I had ever seen in my life. This description was much more ON than I'd ever got out of the more-well-known Myers-Briggs (maybe because I always score so close between Thinking and Feeling and Judging and Perceiving that it almost seems pointless to make the distinctions between them), let alone from What-does-your-favorite-snack-food-say-about-you quizzes or astrology (astrology I discounted many, many years ago. It's not that I don't think the cosmos ISN'T connected in ways we'd never understand, so that the stars COULD affect us, it's that, SERIOUSLY. I was born under ARIES. Now go read the subtitle of that Type 9 description and explain how someone with that result on a personality quiz based on WHAT SHE ACTUALLY DOES could POSSIBLY be affected by the DATE OF HER BIRTH in the way the astrology descriptions say). I think what makes it so dead on is exactly that it ISN'T general. It is VERY SPECIFIC, which makes its Freakish Accuracy all the more fascinating.
Maybe it's great because it isn't about dichotomies. It acknowledges that I can be an introvert who likes people, an optimist who's extremely pessimistic about herself, someone who loves beautiful things but can't keep house or pay attention to her own looks for anything. And yes, that's all in the description of Type 9, if you didn't read it. SOMEHOW, all my quirks, for good (peace and love and FLOWERS!) or for bad (the Deadly Sin associated with Type 9? SLOTH, obviously), are accounted for here (it's possible, if you disagree, that you have never met me in person. My written personality tends to lean a little closer to Type 4, which was indeed my second-place score, but me in real life? Completely that 9). I obsessively kept reading about this ("Obsessive Enneagram Reading": Excuse #3), on the web (here's a longer, more interpretive description of the Type 9, too. Still dead on), in library books. It only became MORE CLEARLY ACCURATE (there's more nuances you can add to the types, too. If you want to be specific, I'm actually a 9w1 with a sexual/social/self-preservational instinctual stack, at approximately a Level 5 health/development level on Zoloft. Dear lord, I was bottoming through Level 7 before the Zoloft-- it was scary, y'all). The other night, after reading a particularly in-depth chapter, it struck me that I felt like the woman Jesus met at the well: "He told me everything I ever did!"
Seriously, if you know me and want to understand me better, go read those descriptions. I'M NOT KIDDING. It EXPLAINS me. I could write on and on about the amazingness of this, how clearly I can see why I do the stupid things I do, and how joyfully I see that the person I WANT to be is actually who I am already deep inside, if I can just work through my HANGUPS and move from that Level 5 up to a Level 3 or so (Also, "I Am A Not-Particularly-Healthy-and-Enlightened Type 9, Currently Enslaved By My Tendency Toward SLOTH": Excuse #4). But I'm not going to do that for you. Instead I will write this very Type-9-ish thing I realized: THIS (all 9 basic types, I mean, not just mine) EXPLAINS WHY PEOPLE MISUNDERSTAND EACH OTHER.
It's so clearly spelled out there, how people really do have completely different ways of experiencing and therefore reacting to the world. So this is why people give each other advice that seems so obvious to the adviser but is completely useless or at least frustrating to the advisee! This is why people have such completely different views of what religion and/or spirituality is or ought to be! This is why we judge and misjudge each other, because we all have such different standards, and our own standards are oh-so-important to us! This is where the communication breakdown comes from. (Also from Led Zeppelin, but that's the GOOD kind of Communication Breakdown).
It makes me think, in a typical 9ish fashion-- WOW, if everyone only really LOOKED at themselves and why they do what they do, and looked at all the other ways OTHER people do what they do, THERE WOULD BE WORLD PEACE. (The folks behind that enneagram site suspect Jim Henson of being Type 9, too [and they totally spelled his name wrong in the description]. I can see that. Obviously he was at a higher level of general EFFECTIVENESS than me, but still). Again I say, it's the lack of dichotomy in this view. It's a range of DIFFERENT ways of seeing that isn't about either/or. It's about ranges and spectrums and parts of wholes. IT'S ABOUT WHOLENESS! And again, that's a very Type 9ish way of looking at it, so maybe I'm just biased and other sorts of people would look at this and not see it at all.
I also decided that it's very likely Madeleine L'Engle was a 9, and that it comes out in Wrinkle, and that probably why I identified so much with Meg is the 9-iness in her. Though she's more of a 9w8 than my 9w1. I almost considered writing a Year of the Tesseract post about it. But maybe that's overdoing it.
--Later, they've gone out to the sandbox and J is busy with his own stuff: RIGHT, so as I was saying, it's DANG hard to compose anything on the computer (I have a LITTLE more luck on paper, because I can do that in a broader variety of locations and don't feel as guilty for spending time on it), which may explain why I haven't posted in forever. Or, many other reasons, about all of which I'll hit on in the following post.
Anyway, one of my teammate-friends on the Lycoris project (which, by the way, another of my letters is up on the Tumblr, in case you only like to read stuff I write-- by the way, "Busy Writing Letters" is Excuse #2 For Why I Haven't Blogged) sent me this link to a personality test a few weeks ago. Now, I love me a good personality test-- not the random-generator ones, but actual personality tests (similar to how I loved blog surveys back when that was a thing), so, sure, I gobbled it up right away. And I followed the directions and read the descriptions of all the types, or at least the types I'd scored highly on (I nearly had a three-way tie), just to be sure.
But I only HAD to read the description of Type 9, my top score by one point, after all. Well, I DID read the others to be sure, to discount the possibility that this was just the sort of general description that could apply to almost anyone, like fortune cookie fortunes and horoscopes and such, but there was NO QUESTION about it. That was the most FREAKISHLY ACCURATE personality test result I had ever seen in my life. This description was much more ON than I'd ever got out of the more-well-known Myers-Briggs (maybe because I always score so close between Thinking and Feeling and Judging and Perceiving that it almost seems pointless to make the distinctions between them), let alone from What-does-your-favorite-snack-food-say-about-you quizzes or astrology (astrology I discounted many, many years ago. It's not that I don't think the cosmos ISN'T connected in ways we'd never understand, so that the stars COULD affect us, it's that, SERIOUSLY. I was born under ARIES. Now go read the subtitle of that Type 9 description and explain how someone with that result on a personality quiz based on WHAT SHE ACTUALLY DOES could POSSIBLY be affected by the DATE OF HER BIRTH in the way the astrology descriptions say). I think what makes it so dead on is exactly that it ISN'T general. It is VERY SPECIFIC, which makes its Freakish Accuracy all the more fascinating.
Maybe it's great because it isn't about dichotomies. It acknowledges that I can be an introvert who likes people, an optimist who's extremely pessimistic about herself, someone who loves beautiful things but can't keep house or pay attention to her own looks for anything. And yes, that's all in the description of Type 9, if you didn't read it. SOMEHOW, all my quirks, for good (peace and love and FLOWERS!) or for bad (the Deadly Sin associated with Type 9? SLOTH, obviously), are accounted for here (it's possible, if you disagree, that you have never met me in person. My written personality tends to lean a little closer to Type 4, which was indeed my second-place score, but me in real life? Completely that 9). I obsessively kept reading about this ("Obsessive Enneagram Reading": Excuse #3), on the web (here's a longer, more interpretive description of the Type 9, too. Still dead on), in library books. It only became MORE CLEARLY ACCURATE (there's more nuances you can add to the types, too. If you want to be specific, I'm actually a 9w1 with a sexual/social/self-preservational instinctual stack, at approximately a Level 5 health/development level on Zoloft. Dear lord, I was bottoming through Level 7 before the Zoloft-- it was scary, y'all). The other night, after reading a particularly in-depth chapter, it struck me that I felt like the woman Jesus met at the well: "He told me everything I ever did!"
Seriously, if you know me and want to understand me better, go read those descriptions. I'M NOT KIDDING. It EXPLAINS me. I could write on and on about the amazingness of this, how clearly I can see why I do the stupid things I do, and how joyfully I see that the person I WANT to be is actually who I am already deep inside, if I can just work through my HANGUPS and move from that Level 5 up to a Level 3 or so (Also, "I Am A Not-Particularly-Healthy-and-Enlightened Type 9, Currently Enslaved By My Tendency Toward SLOTH": Excuse #4). But I'm not going to do that for you. Instead I will write this very Type-9-ish thing I realized: THIS (all 9 basic types, I mean, not just mine) EXPLAINS WHY PEOPLE MISUNDERSTAND EACH OTHER.
It's so clearly spelled out there, how people really do have completely different ways of experiencing and therefore reacting to the world. So this is why people give each other advice that seems so obvious to the adviser but is completely useless or at least frustrating to the advisee! This is why people have such completely different views of what religion and/or spirituality is or ought to be! This is why we judge and misjudge each other, because we all have such different standards, and our own standards are oh-so-important to us! This is where the communication breakdown comes from. (Also from Led Zeppelin, but that's the GOOD kind of Communication Breakdown).
It makes me think, in a typical 9ish fashion-- WOW, if everyone only really LOOKED at themselves and why they do what they do, and looked at all the other ways OTHER people do what they do, THERE WOULD BE WORLD PEACE. (The folks behind that enneagram site suspect Jim Henson of being Type 9, too [and they totally spelled his name wrong in the description]. I can see that. Obviously he was at a higher level of general EFFECTIVENESS than me, but still). Again I say, it's the lack of dichotomy in this view. It's a range of DIFFERENT ways of seeing that isn't about either/or. It's about ranges and spectrums and parts of wholes. IT'S ABOUT WHOLENESS! And again, that's a very Type 9ish way of looking at it, so maybe I'm just biased and other sorts of people would look at this and not see it at all.
I also decided that it's very likely Madeleine L'Engle was a 9, and that it comes out in Wrinkle, and that probably why I identified so much with Meg is the 9-iness in her. Though she's more of a 9w8 than my 9w1. I almost considered writing a Year of the Tesseract post about it. But maybe that's overdoing it.
