I approach internet quizzes with a slight sense of shame. I need to keep reminding myself that they are "for fun" and don't mean anything, and most of the time they are trying to sell me something.

But I have a fondness for puzzles and suspenseful stories, and internet quizzes satisfy this itch when my current read or Netflix binge isn't doing the job. So I often cave and click the button despite the fact that I know I won't remember the result or even the name of the test tomorrow.

I do remember my Myers-Briggs type (INTP), but that's because it was administered to me back in the 90s as a part of State Department foreign service officer intake. Our entire cohort took it, and in fact, my letter "I" ("introverted") was at such an extreme level, the psychologist called me in to re-take the test. And again, I scored as high as one could get. Yep, introvert. Duh, was my response, with not a small amount of eye-rolling.

I think if that had happened today I would realize that they were biased against introverts, and that's why they decided that I couldn't possibly be "that" introverted, and that the test must be broken. But that's another story for another time.
I'm not sure what the State Department brass thought it was going to do with this information. To me it "felt" like the correct result, but so what? I was officially Introverted-Intuitive-Thinking-Perceptive. I do remember the psychologist asking me if I didn't think the "Thinking" tag was wrong also. She thought I was "Feeling" and not "Thinking."

I shrugged. Sure, I had feelings. But I thought I made decisions based on thinking, not feeling. Except...was that even possible, to separate thinking and feeling? What did any of it MEAN, anyway?

Lately I've felt that the Myers-Briggs test (popularly known as the MBTI) has suffered a bit. Here's an article talking about criticisms of the test, which was invented long enough ago (in 1942) that it wasn't subjected to the level of scientific scrutiny that psychologists demand today: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless

I've been wondering why people even take this test anymore, and this article helped me to answer this question: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/06/myers-briggs-type-indicator-does-not-matter/3635592002/

At the very end of the article, Oxford professor Merve Emre comments that the test is likely popular because it's non-judgmental. That was an a-ha moment for me. Non-judgmental. This is exactly why the MBTI feels a bit useless to me, and the enneagram feels supremely useful.

I won't go into a full explanation of what the enneagram is here, since it's easy to google. It's been around for a long time, and I took my first enneagram test a few years ago...again, because it was fun, and again, with no intention of "believing" it. I was just scratching that suspenseful itch. I was a "five." What's a five? Here's a description from the Truity.com website (here's the link if anyone wants a deep dive into the five):

Yep, sounded like me! Then I promptly forgot about the enneagram (itch=scratched).
But one of my favorite meditation teachers (she was a lifeline for me during the early days of COVID), Susan Piver, wrote a book called The Buddhist Enneagram, and because I trust Susan to be a rigorous thinker and anti-BS, I decided to hear what she had to say. And she did not fail me.

Susan is a Buddhist thinker (for what it's worth, I'm not Buddhist myself, but since my mother is from Japan I'm very familiar with Buddhism as it is practiced there), and her explanation of the enneagram framework is in the context of the Buddhist outlook on life. The enneagram system has nine types, but we as humans embody all of them. However, we probably lean toward one of these types more than the others. And buried in each type is both our curse and our gift. Thank you, Susan Piver, for making this clear. I suddenly could see the value of the enneagram. It's not woo-woo, it's not a fortune teller, it's not even a Myers-Briggs-like psychological tool.

What helps me with the enneagram is the part that illuminates the areas where I struggle. As a five, I love being deep inside knowledge. But I often have trouble positioning myself so that I don't fall into a pit of endless knowledge and drown. It's a form of hoarding. It's based in an anxiety, the desire to have ALL the knowledge, the fear that I'm missing something or leaving it out. I end up gathering and gathering. But of course, I can't have ALL the knowledge. That's impossible. So baked into this very good feature of myself is a bad feature of myself.

How to address my tendency to hide from the world and bury myself in knowledge? How do I escape the cycle of hoarding and still attend to my desire to have knowledge?

Susan's explanation makes so much sense. When I read it, I almost cried.

Avarice, or hoarding, is an expression of fear. If I want "omniscience" (the goal of all that knowledge accumulation), I cannot live in fear. I need to trust. I need to open up. Instead of holding on, I need to let go.

And with that realization, I suddenly felt really, really smart. Because I go through repeat phases of letting go--of things, of people, even of projects and efforts and opinions. My life has been a natural cycle of holding close and letting go. Long time readers of my newsletter will recall that I am usually on a decluttering project of one sort or another. It seems that I actually know the answers to the things that cause me the most pain. What an incredible revelation, to know that if I allow myself to see the pain, I can also see the remedy.

This even explains how I was able to drop my kids off at college without tears. I saw all the weepy parents around me and wondered why I wasn't like that--but now it makes sense. I felt so much joy in the letting go! It felt so right and I felt so grateful that the children I had been holding close (I was homeschooling them, after all) for so many years were now going to be in the custody of another place, another set of mentors and friends. Did I miss them? Yes, sort of. The house was too quiet, and I was always a bit sad to see them leave when they came home for holidays. But the joy that I felt--I never forget it.

I forget a lot of things nowadays. I'll take pictures of my restaurant meals so that I don't forget that great glass of wine or that perfectly grilled steak. But I do not forget the joy of letting my kids go.

Letting go and trusting, then, do not have to be scary. It's hard. But that's not the same as scary.

I'm still in a perpetual cycle of hoarding and letting go, and I'm sure I will always be in some part of the arc. Realizing that it IS an arc has been a tremendous gift to me.

I mentioned in my October monthly newsletter that Susan has videos for each personality type on her website. If you’re just curious about your type, that’s a quick way to find it. She discourages tests because people tend to want the “right” test, but you can also take all the freebie ones out there to see where you land. Here are Susan’s videos, and here is a podcast interview with Dan Harris of Ten Percent Happier.

I’ll write more about this topic soon.