Personality

This is something I found really interesting that my friend Corinn introduced me to.
It helped me understand the way my mind works a little better.
I am a Type 4 (with a bit of a Type 5 leaning).
If you haven't heard of The Enneagram theory or taken the test, I encourage you to.
More on this subject later...

http://9types.com/


The Romantic (the Four)

Romantics have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive.


How to Get Along with Me

Give me plenty of compliments. They mean a lot to me.

Be a supportive friend or partner. Help me to learn to love and value myself.

Respect me for my special gifts of intuition and vision.

Though I don't always want to be cheered up when I'm feeling melancholy, I sometimes like to have someone lighten me up a little.

Don't tell me I'm too sensitive or that I'm overreacting!


What I Like About Being a Four

my ability to find meaning in life and to experience feeling at a deep level

my ability to establish warm connections with people

admiring what is noble, truthful, and beautiful in life

my creativity, intuition, and sense of humor

being unique and being seen as unique by others

having aesthetic sensibilities

being able to easily pick up the feelings of people around me


What's Hard About Being a Four

experiencing dark moods of emptiness and despair

feelings of self-hatred and shame; believing I don't deserve to be loved

feeling guilty when I disappoint people

feeling hurt or attacked when someone misundertands me

expecting too much from myself and life

fearing being abandoned

obsessing over resentments

longing for what I don't have


Fours as Children Often

have active imaginations: play creatively alone or organize playmates in original game s

are very sensitive

feel that they don't fit in

believe they are missing something that other people have

attach themselves to idealized teachers, heroes, artists, etc.

become antiauthoritarian or rebellious when criticized or not understood

feel lonely or abandoned (perhaps as a result of a death or their parents' divorce)


Fours as Parents

help their children become who they really are

support their children's creativity and originality

are good at helping their children get in touch with their feelings

are sometimes overly critical or overly protective

are usually very good with children if not too self-absorbed

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The Observer (the Five)


Observers have a need for knowledge and are introverted, curious, analytical, and insightful.


How to Get Along with Me

Be independent, not clingy.

Speak in a straightforward and brief manner.

I need time alone to process my feelings and thoughts.

Remember that If I seem aloof, distant, or arrogant, it may be that I am feeling uncomfortable.

Make me feel welcome, but not too intensely, or I might doubt your sincerity.

If I become irritated when I have to repeat things, it may be because it was such an effort to get my thoughts out in the first place.

don't come on like a bulldozer.

Help me to avoid my pet peeves: big parties, other people's loud music, overdone emotions, and intrusions on my privacy.


What I Like About Being a Five

standing back and viewing life objectively

coming to a thorough understanding; perceiving causes and effects

my sense of integrity: doing what I think is right and not being influenced by social pressure

not being caught up in material possessions and status

being calm in a crisis


What's Hard About Being a Five

being slow to put my knowledge and insights out in the world

feeling bad when I act defensive or like a know-it-all

being pressured to be with people when I don't want to be

watching others with better social skills, but less intelligence or technical skill, do better professionally


Fives as Children Often

spend a lot of time alone reading, making collections, and so on

have a few special friends rather than many

are very bright and curious and do well in school

have independent minds and often question their parents and teachers

watch events from a detached point of view, gathering information

assume a poker face in order not to look afraid

are sensitive; avoid interpersonal conflict

feel intruded upon and controlled and/or ignored and neglected


Fives as Parents

are often kind, perceptive, and devoted

are sometimes authoritarian and demanding

may expect more intellectual achievement than is developmentally appropriate

may be intolerant of their children expressing strong emotions

Self-Inflicted Writer's Block

I think I have imposed upon myself a sort of self-inflicted writer's block. I have been very limited as of late in my creative efforts towards my poetry and music. I believe I have developed some sort of deathly fear of succumbing to the illness of genius. That is not to say that I consider myself a genius, far from it. But it does not take a prodigy to understand the tide, the rush of momentary inspiration. It takes only one creation of any sort to know the sort of madness that the creative process can induce upon the individual through passion, obsession and addiction.


I am currently reading a book about just this disease- all the artist's that have died in some way for their art. Not in the sense that they have literally gone in front of a firing squad for the right of censorship or any other particularly valiant effort. Instead, each has self-medicated their constant need to create and be remembered, which in turn sucked the very life's breath out of their beings. In fact, most writers in particular that committed suicide or overdosed on their drug of choice did so before a new publication or after a bad review. They needed so badly to be accepted and yet could not accept the fame that followed. Or even worse, they could not handle the world not understanding their art. It was either too much praise or far too little, but either was crushing.

For as long as I have nourished my creative side, I have nursed a fear of going mad. There are times when my brain goes into cycles and processes that frighten me beyond my understanding. In the Enneagram's theory of the personality of a four (the romantic and artist, in which I scored extremely high as I did no other personality style), these very traits are laid out in such complex detail that I felt I could not have been understood any better. It was shattering to see that the things I could not explain or verbalize were there in print to say why I have so much difficulty functioning in everyday society. It has also led me to believe that many of these artists would easily fit into this category, which among the 9 personalities has the highest suicide rate. I think this has to do not with an upbringing or circumstances, but with the mind we were born with. Many of those that left notes before their demise mentioned something of their nerves or brains being impossible to cope with.

This is all very dark and dreary, I'm sure you will find, but I am not mentioning this to explain any sort of desire for death. Indeed, it is the exact opposite reason for which I write. I find such a kinship with these lost souls (when I read Sylvia Plath's journals, I felt as though much of her musings were plaigarized from my own unspoken, unwritten thoughts). It is for this very reason that I have found it difficult to create recently. Because I have understood the fever that overtake you when you hand moves of its own accord to bleed the ink onto the pages. I know the feeling of a convulsing brain, ill to retch out some possessive idea. There have been days, weeks, months where all I could do was write. It is like a drug, far more potent than any narcotic. Which makes it easy for me to understand all those who seek to escape through chemical means- it is a cheap relication of the creative process and it either fuels of kills it, either one being a sort of relief.

I have, on occassion, allowed myself a slip here and there to marry words together in a flowing union of ecstatic determination. But recently, it has been a much more logical process rather than organic. I am trying to find out what the mediam is between producing in a healthy manner and simply spilling it out from mental necessity. Today is the first day that I touched my piano in any other intention but self-loathing at my inability to produce what I heard in my head. It was the first time in months that I was able to coherently piece togther a few workable signs of a songs beginning. I feel at war with myself, always a contradiction for feeling like I was created to create and feeling like any constant creation will be my destruction. For to be honest and raw, it is required to unveil the sub-conscious and deep inner shadows. But lingering there too long will scar. I have a great fear of failure and a driving need to succeed, but am my own harshest critic. I never feel as though what I do produce is good enough or has any lasting value. But if I can find that place, to keep all sides of me at peace, there... there's the goal.

My Nirvana

Ever since I was little, one of my favorite places in all the world was a bookstore, any bookstore, really. Whether it was filled with Barnes & Noble commercialism or rare & antique collectibles, I could spend hours browsing and inhaling the soft paper and leather scents. There was something magical about the required hush and the rush of flipping pages. These places brought together the child & the adult, the conservative & the liberal, the mother & the feminist, the intellectuals and the masses.


It was like an eternal treasure hunt- a search to find a previously unearthed literary gem from a new author, a new genre, a different time in history, a different point of view, or most deliciously, a kinship. As opposed to all those times that I felt myself to be a black sheep or outcast, here amongst the poets and philosophers I found solace. A brethren of unique, yet shared minds. My brain and fingers stood ever ready, greedy even, for the next physical representation of an epiphany, a journey, an understanding.

Though I consider myself to enjoy all sorts of books, my favorites by far are the ones that ache with age. The ones with cracked, dusty spines and thick, stained pages. I have a not-so-obssession with discovering- and collecting- old books, the older the better. Most of the ones I currently possess are from the 19th century, a few from the early 20th century and one that has an origin completely unknown. It is so old that it has no publication date. It bewitches me every time I see it, because it is cloaked in mystery. And with all of these books that are centuries old, I desperately wonder into whose hands have they passed through. How many people have read and re-read and loved and memorized each line like a sacred mantra?

Some, aside from age or beauty, hold value in their content alone. There is a first-edition copy of Sylvia Plath's Colussus at a rare book room that haunts me. If I was able, I would gladly pay the steep $400 price tag for the possibility of somehow being closer to the author.
At times, it is a book as a whole that moves me, but more frequently, it is a chapter or paragraph alone that I MUST read and re-read, ingest and digest, over and over. A part of a chapter in Les Miserables that so exquisitely describes the priest's life and his relationship with nature & God. A chapter in A Happy Death (Camus) in which the main character analyzes his feelings towards his current lover with shocking and brutal honesty. It is a complete contradiction at times, with constant flashes of intense emotion. Things that we think, though never utter aloud are bled onto paper so that we cannot deny the resonance in our own lives. Sometimes it is even just a single line, though. Such as for me, Anne Sexton's, "I am the queen of all my sins forgotten."

Just a few words or sentences or paragraphs strung together in such perfection that it steals the breath from your lungs and makes you pine for genius to be found within yourself. To be remembered. To be adored. To change culture or ideas. To connect with even just one person across the span of centuries, or God-willing, millions of people. As Oscar Wilde said, "All art is quite useless." But beauty, or more aptly the manifestation of beauty through art is divine and noble- whether dark or bright, oridnary or extraordinary, haunted or inspired. Art, whether in a literary form or not, is how a generation is remembered & how a generation is changed.

Every time I browse the aisles of a bookstore I am reminded of all the lives & thoughts & sacrifices that are entangled on each shelf. Hundreds of years of people producing lasting and impacting words.

Reality?

There is reality. There is perceived reality. There is our reality. But what is real is only real because we say it's real, we are told it's real, we feel it's real or we learn/know it's real (which in fact is the often the same as being told it's real). We perceive and process in opposites. We know what is possible by what's impossible and vice versa. "Facts" are based on an overall consensus and a general belief. To prove something, often means it is just not known how to disprove it.

So how much of what is "impossible" is just so because we have limited our mental capabilities and set up strict boundaries and limitations? I don't mean this in an inspirational sense, but in a supernatural sense, but supernatural only because we do not understand it as natural or normal, not because it is in fact strange or super.

The term "faith like a child" applies to general life in this sense. Children believe and trust because of what is introduced to them in various forms of ideas. Their realiy is created out of the reality we know as adults. Before we have a hand in shaping them, they only have the limits that are immediately in front of them, not any abstract instances. They are limited only by their inexperience or inability (as they can sense it).

We are told things are "supernatural" because they are uncommon or inhuman. But how much of what we know as uncommon is that way because we have MADE it that way? How much of reality IS perception? How much of our world and our understanding of it is completely man-made? What are we truly capable of?

For example, there is the standard phrases "the sky is blue" or "your hair is long". They are so, because we have deemed certain terms to represent colors and measurements. So really, when we say "the sky is blue" we are saying "the sky is the hue we have deemed it, but not truly even that is true, because it APPEARS to exist as a color that we have named, when in fact it depends on where you are in the universe.". No phrase or idea or "fact" is ever simple. Everything we "know" and say is loaded, as an answer and a question. And as has been said before, everything is an argument.

It seems to me, it is all open to interpretation and it is all what we make it.

The Jar is Ringing

I see having pressing, insistent needs as a weakness. And yet not having that which I have deemed necessary renders me ill. I have a fear of being vulnerable, of having human tendencies. I try to shut off my emotions, but I am not wired to do so. Not just because it is mentally impossible, but because as an artist, it is logistically impossible. It is a constant ebb and flow. I need to create therefore I need to feel and experience. I need to feel and experience therefore I need to create. I have a greedy desire to dissect the unknown both in myself and in the outside world. I want to know history and present, life and death, though and action... I want to know the human process as intricately as it is possible to know it from the biased position in which I stand. I cannot know things as others would. My circumstance and childhood and lifestyle keep it from being so.


But there is so much I can learn. Every tiny little detail in the most mundane and seemingly insignificant shadow of an existence. I crave knowledge, yet I fear it with every aging bone in my body. Ignorance can indeed be bliss, though a life left unlived as well. But some things, the shifting, creaking blackness that inhabits our world... they can be better left unfound. Things can not be unlearned. They burrow into your brain, leaving cigarette burns on the surface and gaping wounds not far below. There is so much of human nature that is almost unfathomable. It can be truly frightening and at the same time awe strikingly beautiful all bound up in the same person.

I wonder sometimes how long I can carry this burden. The burden of one who has seen too much, but not nearly enough. Of one that is driven to create, but so wearied from daily toils that I have nothing left to give back. My mind is a labryinth of contradictions and slayed demons. It is a maze of torment and blinding sunshine. I love so deeply, but try at all costs to restrain it before it destroys me. The universe is vast, but mine is not. It is a silvery bubble that ripples and floats above... it is only a matter of time.