After a moment, it occurred to me that I wasn’t in the small room that I usually take the test in, and that there might be somebody still in the room with me. I looked around the cabinet to my left and sure enough, there was a man taking a test on the other side of the cabinet. Ugh! He had 100% heard me sniffling and muttering…there’s no way he hadn’t. My feelings first turned to embarrassment and shame and then my mind began trying to sooth my shame feelings by telling myself that I would never see the man again (hopefully), that he only saw the back of my head and not my face (hopefully), that others would think it was funny that I was crying during a math test (like, “oh, yeah, I don’t blame you…”…hopefully), and that because of these things, it didn’t matter at all that I was acting so strangely dramatic. It embarrassed me the most that I was crying.
I still don’t know what my result is on the test, but it’s likely that I didn’t do as horribly as I am expecting. I went to the math center afterward and checked my notes to see if there was a problem on how to change a given polar angle into rectangular coordinates, something we didn’t practice in our homework. I was surprised to see that my logical thinking made up for my lack of knowledge on how to do the problem, and I’m pretty sure I got that particular problem right. That made me feel better as I tried to sooth my deep feelings of incompetence that made me feel like I should give up mathematics for all eternity. Annoyingly, feeling intelligent again caused me to feel dissatisfied about the fact that I had been dealt a frustrating hand of having a very intelligent brain and disorders that were hindering it, while I had insanely successful, intelligent siblings. All of a sudden, I was worrying about the fact that there was nothing particularly special about me. That I had no significance.
While all of this was going through my brain, I was also trying different thoughts and angles and techniques to calm my internal shame-based lonely chaos. I breathed deeply, tried not to mutter to myself in public, tried to laugh off my feelings humorously, and tried to be grateful that I wasn’t still stuck learning basic fractions like some of the wonderful people I’ve met in the math center whom I am hoping to help soon as a tutor. I never truly calmed down until I imagined that I was walking next to a replica of myself or rather that I was two identical persons. That there was another of me with me and she was holding my hand and knew exactly what I was feeling and she welcomed me as I was. I imagined her smiling, skipping, and not caring that she probably didn’t get an A on that math test. I had her say to me, “What a lovely, sunny day! Thank you for listening to me. I know that it’s hard for you to listen to me right now because your feelings are so intense, deep, and dark. I respect your feelings, and I appreciate that right now, you’re still respecting mine too. We are one.” I started to realize my complete negative feelings as unfairness and cruelty to myself. I tried to feel what it would actually feel like to have her hold my hand. It was not easy as I don’t typically hold peoples’ hands. But when I felt like I could connect to the thought to an extent, I felt much calmer inside.
The past few days, I have been reading a bit about Enneagrams. The Enneagram is a personality theory that describes different personality types, each with a “dilemma” or “complex” around a certain theme that each type has developed in life regarding certain core basic fears and desires. I currently closely relate to Type Four and Type Five. As I think about it, how fitting that my blog which I started many years ago should be called “Feelings to Think and Thoughts to Feel”. With the seemingly paradoxical combination in my personality of the emotional dramatics of type Four and the emotional withdraw of a Five, my life can feel pretty confusing. I read on one website that somebody decided to describe the type 4 and 5 combo an “existential insect among humans”. Jerk. Haha! I’ll ignore that label…or just laugh at it, because I don’t even think they were necessarily trying to be insulting.
In past, I had gotten really involved in personality theories like the Myer’s-Briggs theory, and later ditched that theory as inaccurate and inadequate. I had heard about the Enneagram before, but hadn’t looked into it much until my therapist mentioned it to me. She said that if I was triggered by a situation because of my CPTSD, and I had really deep feelings of Depression that made me want to withdraw (not something I’ve experienced as much recently, thankfully), then I could remind myself that I wasn’t alone, and I was just acting very much “like a Four” right now, but that wasn’t all of who I was. Having read more about the different types, I relate a lot to the core worries of many of the types, but in particular, I think the type Four and Five types really resonate with me overall more than any other personality descriptions that I’ve read because, for one, it gets to the root of what has formed my personality and what I can do to move in the direction of growth, and two, it seems to be the only theory that accurately describes both my intensely dramatic emotional life (type Four) as well my feelings of complete emotional disconnect around others (type Five) until I am able to find some alone time to feel safe and secure enough to feel at all.
I both experience the intense need of a type Four to cry during my math test and rage at someone, as well as to the immediate feeling of lack of safety like a type Five once I have discovered that my true expression of feelings might have been seen by someone. I have experienced the dark side of extreme love-stricken longing and grief as well as the beautiful poetic thread it caused in me (typical type Four). I have also been the extremely rational, emotionally disconnected person in a crisis (typical type Five), like when my mom, brother, and sister were upset when our family dog died; and when my mom came to get me and tell me, my response was simply curiosity to the point of almost a feeling of excitement at what death could possibly be, along with a disconnected suppressed horror of it, and if I felt anything including sadness at all, it was simply empathy while I comforted my crying little sister (a kid at the time).
I am learning to embrace these different aspects of myself as all of me. And it is nice to be recognized in an impersonal way on paper, through the Enneagram, what struggles I have endured in life and how it has shaped me. Observant Fives, like myself, want very much to understand and rationalize everything in order to feel protected from an environment that might (and sometimes does) demand more than we are capable of offering, and thus reveal (supposedly) that we are incompetent, useless, wastes of space. Individualistic Fours like myself have lost sight to our core of the fact that we are connected to all people and things, and struggle constantly with feelings of abandonment and a lack of significance, and so stress our individual selves so strongly so as to try and feel as if we have not been forgotten.
Yesterday at work, a nice elderly lady customer said to me a couple of times, “Slow down! You’ll run out of steam.” I thought to myself, “I might be running through the store getting lots done, running to help customers, but in general, I’ve accomplished nothing in my life in comparison to other people. Other people are always on the go constantly, and I just feel like the world demands too much of me that I don’t have to offer. As I thought about it more, I really do need to slow down. Because on the inside, I keep running and running and running and running…
Slow down.
Be present. Know yourself.
Feel your thoughts.
Think your feelings.
Learn to work with them and not against them.
Hold your own hand when things get hard,
Even if someone else is holding it with you,
And even if they aren’t.
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