Nobody Understands Me (Because I Am So Deep)

Unique human being variety number four

I dislike being typed. Labels of all kind give me an itchy, hair-shirt feeling, and I have avoided them all my life—sometimes to my detriment. I have a habit of viewing self-labeling as not just “bad” for myself, but bad for other people too. Few things make my heart sink faster than when we’re having a perfectly good conversation and you go and self-define. “I’m just like that…” “I’m bad at math…” “I’m a Pisces…” I sense a premature closure of possibility, and I have an impulse to disprove that for you.

But I have had a vague curiosity about the Enneagram system for a while, since reading a

Sasha Chapin

essay about it in which he says that the Enneagram helped him achieve some self-understanding. I have rarely regretted trying things Chapin recommends—MDMA self-inquiry, weightlifting, forgiving myself—and I like the affable, I-don’t-know-man-but-somehow style in which he does the recommending, which tends to background annoying explanations about why the thing in question “works.” Recently his spouse

Cate Hall

, whose blog I’d also recommend, wrote this post about the Enneagram that reminded me of its existence. And a few days ago I was sick, and the brain fog made it hard to do anything besides sit on the porch and read, so I found myself consuming ~one and a half books’ worth of Enneagram literature, and that is the rather strange experience I am going to speak from now.

Sasha and Cate both say that Enneagram tests are not that reliable. If you want to know your type, the thing to do is to read the various type descriptions in one of the many Enneagram books out there—I referred mainly to The Enneagram by Richard Rohr and The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Richard Riso and Ross Hudson—and wait until you find a description that makes you profoundly uncomfortable. This profound discomfort seems to be a necessary piece of the Enneagram conversion experience. Personality tests are dumb and incomplete, people are so much more complicated, this is astrology for nerds… but then you see your strengths and foibles laid out in cold language, your quirks predicted with weird specificity, and something changes.

I have often thought that Sasha and I are a similar type of guy. We’re both writers of blogs dealing with feelings and nondual meditationy stuff, we both seem to have had long periods of self-loathing and creative blockage before hitting a major uptick in happiness around age thirty or so, we both love John Williams’s novel Stoner. So I started with Sasha’s type, type Seven, aka “the Enthusiast.” I could see a tendency of mine, especially a recent tendency, in the Enthusiast’s drive to taste everything, to experience all of life’s pleasures, to overwhelm himself with projects and near-future plans. I too tend toward a generalist dilettante-ism, and fear committing to any one activity or person because I feel that doing so will “limit” me.

I saw less of myself in, well, the enthusiasm part. I’m a cheerful enough fellow, but I doubt that anyone would describe me as “radiat[ing] joy and optimism,” in Riso and Hudson’s phrasing. And something felt off about the Seven’s life project of avoiding anxiety and emotional pain. I don’t really do that, at all, actually. If anything, I tend to seek those things out and enthuse about them.

It was an odd relief to conclude that I am not the same type as Sasha. It freed me from a weird thing that seemed to be going on, where I have sometimes felt simultaneously compelled and repulsed by his writing style, as if part of me wants to imitate it and another part is hesitant to even read it, lest I lose something in an inevitable imitation. I can’t help noticing it feels safer to write about a thing he recommended, now that I know that he and I are not the same dude. This has something to do with specialness, and probably with envy, which, well, I’ll get to that.

Riso and Hudson (henceforth R&H) say that Nines (Peacemakers), Threes (Achievers), and Twos (Helpers) are the types most likely to misidentify themselves as Sevens, so I looked at those next. Again, I saw pieces of myself in each (most of all the Achiever), but none of them made me feel actively rotten.

Then I looked again at R&H’s table of contents, and “The Individualist”—Type 4—caught my eye. And this is where things became weird. I had a complicated reaction just reading the labels they had given to this type—“the Melancholic,” “the Aesthete,” “the Special One.” I felt, and feel, a tightly coupled attraction and aversion around these words, as if one part of me were saying “it’s me, it’s me, it’s me,” and another were saying “it can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be.”

I notice that this essay is taking on the momentum of a conversion or an epiphany, and part of me is wanting to resist that. “I am noting a strange feeling I have around a particular self-description, that’s all. I am simply trying to practice the intention I expressed in my last post, to ‘write closer to the edge of my sense-making,’ which is not currently very senseful.”

Yes. True. And. The feelings I had reading the Four chapter were, and are, weirdly intense. And from the perspective of the Enneagram, my complicated feelings around self-typing themselves look extremely Four-ish. Being type-able would mean I am similar to other people, and, as R&H put it, “Fours maintain their identity by seeing themselves as fundamentally different from others.”

Fours feel that they are unlike other human beings and, consequently, that no one can understand them or love them adequately. They often see themselves as uniquely talented, possessing special, one-of-a-kind gifts, but also as uniquely disadvantaged or flawed. More than any other type, Fours are acutely aware of and focused on their personal differences and deficiencies.

Why does pasting that quote here feel like sharing a page from my diary? It also reminds me of something I was told recently, in a class I was taking, by someone who had only met me a few sessions before. “You exude self-awareness,” he said. “It’s very amusing to me.” I felt uncomfortably seen, and—uncomfortably amused, which fits uncomfortably well with the Four’s core desire of being truly witnessed.

Let’s look at some other descriptions that made my chest do things:

Healthy Fours are willing to reveal highly personal and potentially shameful things about themselves because they are determined to understand the truth of their experience—so that they can discover who they are and come to terms with their emotional history.

This is a strong trait of mine (have you read my blog?). It also accurately describes the form of journaling I’ve practiced since I was a teenager, wherein I take the wriggling shame-worms from inside myself and put them on a microscope slide for fun and edification. (I find it so weird that everyone doesn’t journal constantly.) According to R&H the Four inhabits what they call the Feeling Triad, the types most concerned with self-image and with managing the feeling of shame. ‘Tis true… shame is an important, complicated, even erotic feeling for me. I distinctly remember as a young child feeling that “embarrassed” was an extremely useful word for describing my experience. If you spend time with me and I like you, I will tell you things I’m ashamed of, kind of a lot of them, though I probably won’t mention the shame part, and you may think I’m just unusually open, which is also true.

Fours often report that they feel they are missing something in themselves, though they may have difficulty identifying exactly what that something is… They feel that they lack a clear and stable identity, particularly a social persona that they feel comfortable with.

This resonates to the degree that I find it hard to imagine it not being universal. But then, all the Enneagram types are universal—the Type that you “are,” according to the theory, is more a matter of emphasis. At some point in your early childhood, the story goes, you picked up a simple strategy of perception and reaction that seemed (and probably was) terrifically useful; that strategy became a tic that you brought into most situations; that tic became the gravity well around which the rest of your personality constellated. I don’t know exactly how true this story is—it’s almost definitely weirder than that, there are exceptions to most developmental patterns—but recent experiences have made it seem worth entertaining. And I would suggest that if you reflect for a minute on your experiences, you may find a part of you agreeing that, yes, humans are bottomlessly variable and unique, and also, there seem to be about nine of us. Nine is about the right amount.

I remember a moment on my first tantric retreat when one of the teachers said, “Knowing yourself, knowing your patterns, is a very important part of tantra.” My immediate response was, fuck, I guess I can’t do tantra then, I don’t know anything about myself. I remember also that the drama of that retreat was that I felt I had no social role in the group—everyone around me seemed more real, more substantial, more “themselves” than I could imagine being. I find it extremely funny to imagine that the fear of never knowing myself is one of my core patterns, a loop my “self” is built on. The recursivity is both beautiful and on-brand.

It would seem that Fours are so strongly in the habit of peering into their own feelings, they are better equipped than anyone to know that there is nothing really in there—no stable self or personality or homunculus from which to draw a fully coherent way of being. In our eagerness to shore up forms to satisfy the projected expectations of those around us, we become the connoisseurs of an increasingly fine-grained emptiness.¹ We look so closely at our act that it falls apart. The stuff going on inside us is all very fascinating and particular and vivid, but in its refusal to inhabit a clear form it also looks like the gaping absence of a suchness everyone else seems to have.

Or: By fixating on emotional honesty, I am driven to ever-deepening layers of doubt about any of the frames I might use to convey my transient states. Everything I say about myself seems more false the more true I try to make it. If it were true, I wouldn’t be able to say it at all. But I have to say something. After all—

While it is true that Fours often feel different from others, they do not really want to be alone. They may feel socially awkward or self-conscious, but they deeply wish to connect with people who understand them and their feelings. The “romantics” of the Enneagram, they long for someone to come into their lives and appreciate the secret self that they have privately nurtured and hidden from the world.

If I’m being honest with myself (and there’s that idea again), I feel I started writing mostly because I longed for someone to come into my life and appreciate the secret self that I had privately nurtured and hidden from the world.² Seeing this clearly helps me see why fame has typically been a secondary part of the picture. I’ve often felt like I’m supposed to care about fame, or outward career success, more than my actions suggest I do, because fame is what success at writing is purported to look like. But if I’m really only looking for one person, or at best a few, then it becomes clearer why popularity has always seemed like a roundabout method. (Based on the kinds of friends writing has helped me make recently, I may actually be doing a good job.)

If, over time, such validation remains out of reach, Fours begin to build their identity around how unlike everyone else they are…

In elementary school I never listened to pop music. I mean I actually wouldn’t listen to it, even if it was right there on the radio, because I feared that knowing the words would make my inner world too similar to that of the people around me. I then proceeded to feel alienated at school dances (whose steps I refused to learn). I refused to watch MTV when everyone else was watching it, so I never got all the jokes and references people made about it. I compensated for all this with the thought that I had my own, private jokes and references, which were more clever and better-sourced than theirs. I do this kind of thing less as an adult, but I definitely still do it. For instance, right now I feel a genuine curiosity about the recent Kendrick-Drake feud, which my friends have made sound interesting, but some part of me is genuinely averse to the homogenization of mental contents that the act of listening would feel like.

I remember a girl I dated once saying something along the lines of, “I just want to be normal.” I could not believe her. Normal? It was like wanting a pillow over your face.

And yet I find myself peeking into the windows of the so-called “normal” people all the time, as if to confirm that their insides are more boring—or perhaps more comfortable, more peaceful, more relaxed—than mine.

Fours typically have problems with a negative self-image and chronically low self-esteem. They attempt to compensate for this by cultivating a Fantasy Self—an idealized self-image that is built up primarily in their imaginations.

These days I would describe myself as confident in most situations. But it feels hard-won. As a kid, I had strong Fantasy Selves and identified strongly with fantasy characters, especially wizards with enormous power and bad social skills, especially the kind whose magic came from gods or in-born talent instead of hard work.

I am also still prone to constructing impossible standards for myself which I then project onto others, as if paradoxically they were expecting me to continually astonish them with acts of unforeseen brilliance. I was talking to a friend recently about writing a novel and he asked (in an open way, as a prompt), “Do you feel like you could write a novel that would be up to your standards right now?” Reflecting on this, I realized that a) the internal standard I had set for myself was Anna Karenina, b) the answer was no, I do not think I could write a book as good as Anna fucking Karenina right now, and c) I was genuinely, childishly upset by this fact, to the extent that I cried about it a wee bit on my walk home.

In the course of their lives, Fours may try several different identities on for size, basing them on styles, preferences, or qualities they find attractive in others. But underneath the surface, they still feel uncertain about who they really are. The problem is that they base their identity largely on their feelings. When Fours look inward, they see a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting pattern of emotional reactions. Indeed, Fours accurately perceive a truth about human nature—that it is dynamic and ever changing. But because they want to create a stable, reliable identity from their emotions, they attempt to cultivate only certain feelings while rejecting others. Some feelings are seen as “me,” while others are “not me.” By attempting to hold on to and express specific moods, Fours believe that they are being true to themselves.

Again, this describes a younger version of myself particularly well. I loved novels above all other art forms because they presented packages of identities, emotional aesthetics, personas I could try on and out (and then inevitably abandon with the next book I reached for). As a teenager I used music and literature to cultivate states of melancholy (apparently a favorite Four feeling), whose heaviness I would allow myself to briefly escape via carefully staged epiphanies or Dionysian psychedelic experiments. I have a distinct memory of driving home from high school in my hand-me-down pickup truck, listening to Bright Eyes at full volume and fantasizing that some girl—passing through on her way to someplace far from this sleepy nowhere—would hear the sound and feel vaguely sad that she would never get to know me.

As I’ve aged, I’ve internalized a lot of good critiques of romanticism, and Romanticism—and my meditation practice also has made me much less likely to “cultivate only certain feelings while rejecting others”; in fact that’s been largely the point. That said, when I did a brief internal check on whether I was cultivating a particular mood right now, something loosened in my head and I had an immediate sense of “oh no, now anything could happen.” So that might be something for me to look into.

One of the biggest challenges Fours face is learning to let go of feelings from the past; they tend to nurse wounds and hold on to negative feelings about those who have hurt them. Indeed, Fours can become so attached to longing and disappointment that they are unable to recognize the many treasures in their lives…

There is a Sufi story that relates to this, about an old dog that had been badly abused and was near starvation. One day the dog found a bone, carried it to a safe spot, and started gnawing away. The dog was so hungry that it chewed on the bone for a long time and got every last bit of nourishment that it could out of it. After some time, a kind old man noticed the dog and its pathetic scrap and began quietly setting food out for it. But the poor hound was so attached to its bone that it refused to let go of it and soon starved to death.

Fours are in the same predicament. As long as they believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, they cannot allow themselves to experience or enjoy their many good qualities. To acknowledge their good qualities would be to lose their sense of identity (as a suffering victim) and to be without a relatively consistent personal identity (their Basic Fear). Fours grow by learning to see that much of their story is not true—or at least it is not true anymore. The old feelings begin to fall away once they stop telling themselves their old tale: it is irrelevant to who they are right now.

I have mixed feelings about this. The diagnosis feels accurate, the prescription muddled. I do sometimes dwell on old disappointments, especially heartbreaks that seemed to corroborate the belief that there was something wrong with me, something I can’t find myself but that other people could recognize upon getting sufficiently close. I do get freaked out about, for instance, the incessant aging of my face, and forget to appreciate that it is still a pretty good one.

The parable of the dog speaks to something in me that has felt much more visible lately—a way that I find myself continuing to pick up a self-fixing attitude despite nothing really seeming to be all that wrong anymore, despite life being in fact extraordinarily generous—as if my biggest remaining attachment is to the reparative mindset itself.

Now here’s the part where R&H describe my romantic history with uncomfortable accuracy.

Because they have doubts about their identity, they tend to play “hide and seek” with others—hiding from people, but hoping that their absence will be noticed. Fours attempt to remain mysterious and intriguing enough to attract someone who will notice them and redeem them with their love. But self-concealment and self-revelation alternate and can be expressed with such extremes of intensity and need that Fours inadvertently drive the longed-for rescuer away.

A bit extreme, but it hits. Hiding and revealing are strong themes in my love life, and my life life, and directly expressing desire often feels to me like it will end a complicated game I’m supposed to be playing for reasons I’ve forgotten. Apparently Fours are prone to becoming infatuated with people who are not actually available for some reason or other, and yes, this has been an unfortunate trend. Apparently Fours are also prone to becoming bored quickly in relationships, and that happens too. Knowing this, I can be protective of the distance between me and someone I’m interested in, as if to hold off an inevitable disappointment one of us is bound to feel. I seem to find it harder than most to believe that anyone is sustainably fascinating at close range (which suggests a fastening on fascination itself).

Just recently I fell into one of these hopeless crushes—the first in a long time—and when it came clear that the thing I thought I wanted was definitely not going to happen, I had an opportunity to keenly experience the precise response I had been hoping to avoid—a sense of constriction and compression around my heart. Glommed like a barnacle to this knotted-up feeling was the interpretation, “This is yet more evidence that there is something deeply wrong with me.”

I have been learning new ways of playing with patterns lately and I was curious to try something different, so I told this person (with whom I’d built enough mutual trust that this wasn’t totally deranged) “I know this isn’t going to work out the way I wanted, and that’s okay; but it seems like what I really want you to tell me, aside from all that, is that I’m lovable, that you could imagine loving me, even though you aren’t going to.” Making this request felt playful and futile and extraordinarily dangerous, like I’d casually broken the cardinal rule of unrequited infatuation. It was as if this part of me were saying: “I know we like self-revelation and all, but you weren’t supposed to reveal that.”

She did not honor my request—she was kind about it, I understood. But instead of the expected shame, or really right there alongside it, I found the experiment illuminating, oddly thrilling. On the other end of it I’m finding myself able to be with the constriction in a different way, with less of a compulsion to climb inside the bear trap and force its jaws back open, to “disprove” the underlying “belief.” This “just let it be happening” option, in relation to this particular clench, feels very new, and it is bizarre, bizarre, to find I can have a conversation with my parents and do a call with a coaching client and write an essay about my quirked-up personality all while playing host to a besmirched and constricted heart, and nothing actually terrible is happening to anyone, it just really isn’t that bad. In the past I’d have felt like I had to journal this out, or sit and feel all the feelings until something shifted, or wander around for days in a saccharine fog of remorseful self-pity. (According to the literature, Fours often feel like they have to tend to their emotions before doing anything else.)

At this point, let me check: am I fully Enneagram-pilled? Perhaps not. But I am starting to understand better the relief people describe on receiving psychiatric diagnoses. I don’t want to say that the Enneagram is metaphysically “real” or that being a Type Four is the deep truth of my soul (hah!). Just that it is nice to feel that there is enough signal in my noise for someone to come along and compress it a bit. It is nice to feel connected at least this much with the human race, which seems to be the kind of “basic,” “ordinary” experience my type tries to avoid. I’m reminded of a line I once wrote in a rather disturbing little short story: “Hadn’t I’d been waiting for my illness to strike, to baptise me, to tie my many small loose abjections into a sack that I could chew from like a morphined horse?”

Only I do not feel morphined, I feel good and awake.

I’m finding that Fourness also helps me make sense of, in a sense affirm, a tendency in my writing that I’ve often felt conflicted about—its self-absorption, its inwardness. In wiser, happier moments, I write about myself and my processes with a feeling that this is not different from writing about the world—which I am, after all, a part of, made of. I fancy myself a journalist of the subjective, a scientist pointing a telescope at the far reaches of the human heart. Someone has to sift the sludge of momentary salience into the slightly more digestible sludge of words, and this is the joyful duty my weird proclivities have equipped me for.

In less happy moments, I feel like I write this way because the interior is all I’ve allowed myself to know. I am constitutionally ignorant, baffled by the real, and everyone else is too clear and confident to be reached. Somehow they all know the rules, they know exactly what they want and why, they glide without friction in a world of hard objects while I sit here tracing the shadows that world casts on my floor. I give names to the shadows, I make up theories about their causes and draw maps of their relationships, and this passes the time, but what I’m secretly hoping is that someone will appear at the window and say “Wow, there is something so interesting about the way you draw.”

R&H call Fours “the deep-sea divers of the psyche,” and claim that they “have a particular kind of creativity, a personal creativity, which is fundamentally autobiographical.” When I read this, something in me relaxes, as if there is an invitation here to relax resistance of a natural bent. I am reminded of how often I have connected with people, mysteriously but deeply, by trying to convey to them the state of my organs. “Healthy Fours receive the mirroring they seek by sharing the depths of their souls. As they do this, they discover with relief that their own nature is, at root, no different from anyone else’s.”

One of the main obstacles to this discovery, according to the literature, is the Four’s chronic envy. According to Richard Rohr (a Franciscan priest), it is my “root sin.”

[Fours] see immediately who has more style, more class, more taste, more talent, more unusual ideas, more genius than they do. They see who is simpler, more natural, more normal, and “healthier” than they are. There is nothing that a FOUR couldn’t be envious about. Helen Palmer quotes a FOUR: “How is it that other people seem to hold hands and smile a lot? What do they have with each other that I don’t have? You get on a Holy Grail search to find the something more; grasping for something that satisfied my friends, but which misses me entirely.”

Rohr is right—there’s little I can’t envy. I am not merely envious of the usual things—people’s relationships, their careers, their large happy proximal families, their good looks, their book deals, their superior intelligences, their youth, their experience. That, friends, is child’s play. I have envied disability, child abuse, madness, crippling drug addictions, family tragedies, scraping poverty, military enlistment, glaring psychological blind spots, terrible taste. The only things I rarely envy are possessions and status markers—it’s mostly qualities, interesting ways of being, and love.

Envy of this nature is at root a longing for connection, coupled with a cargo cult mythology which says that connection requires precise behaviors, as if everyone else had the new USB-C ports and I am walking around the party with an aux cable. When I see people connecting more easily than I do, my habitual response is to extract qualities or conditions from my model of them as an attempt to account for what makes our experiences different. If the envied quality seems achievable, I make plans to acquire it. If it isn’t, I sulk and wonder why and when God stopped liking me. Either way, connection is delayed. In school I was often secretly envious of what I considered the stupidity of everyone around me, even though I didn’t exactly want it, because it seemed to make socializing so much easier for them. (“In high school, being smart is exactly like being radioactive.” - Malcolm in the Middle.) In college, I started to meet more people who were “like me,” and I quickly became envious of their intelligence and the cultural knowledge they were able to range over at parties. I don’t think I noticed then how contextual my envy was, how the same quality was experienced with attraction or aversion depending on my model of the group.

A kind of slow progress that has occurred in my life is that over time my envy seems to be more and more aligned with the qualities I actually, in the last analysis, do find beautiful. I am envious these days of my friends’ kindness, of their dynamism, of their generosity. To a large extent I feel I have learned to make friends with envy itself, such that I’m more likely to consider it a positive signal. Envy reveals something I want to embody more fully, and it often reveals the people I have the most to learn from—or at least the people in whose company I am most likely to discover an alienated self-possibility. If I haven’t felt envious in a while, and then I do, I find it exciting. It means I’ve found a new potential friend, collaborator, teacher.

In a Pochinko “clown through mask” class last year, which involved trance states and possession by entities of ambiguous ontological status, I was briefly inhabited by a persona who was very simple-minded, non-verbal, innocent, okay, retarded, okay, and who saw everyone around him as hopelessly beautiful. Looking at people through his eyes was like sitting in a cathedral and letting my eyes wander along the stained glass. Everyone my eyes touched had a marvelous light shining out from within them, an ineffably precise and particular light I would never taste from the inside, and I could only stare at them in stunned gratitude for the privilege of being lit by such an extraordinary radiance. If the other people noticed me, if they went so far as to interact with me, I trembled like a leaf in the pleasure of their seeing.

That, I think now, was what “envy” can look like when liberated from fixed patterning.

The “opposite” way it can look is encapsulated in the song “Sensitive Artist” by King Missile.

I am a sensitive artist
Nobody understands me because I am so deep
In my work I make allusions to books that nobody else has read
Music that nobody else has heard
And art that nobody else has seen
I can't help it
Because I am so much more intelligent
And well-rounded
Than everyone who surrounds me

(Had you heard that song before? No, I didn’t think so…)

A final word about self-criticism… as I read the Enneagram literature, I can’t help feeling that the Enneagram writers don’t seem to like us Fours all that much. All types have strengths and weaknesses, but the language in the Four entries gets darker faster, and the darkness seems more extreme. We come off as histrionic snowflakes obsessed with petty dramas, the proverbial awful roommate, altogether kind of a mess. This is not how I experience myself, and makes me wonder if I have mistyped—but then, a certain amount of bias and misunderstanding makes sense here… it is hard to imagine Fours contributing much to the Enneagram tradition; we probably skipped most of the meetings. One feels that these writers may have bought a little too much into the Four’s vivid self-propaganda, taken our sad songs at face value, missed the complicated loving in our self-excoriations. (If this essay makes you think I don’t like myself, you’ve missed the forest for the trees.) It’s plausible that the Enneagram’s Christian influences are playing a role here, and some of the Enneagrammers recognize—accurately—that unreformed Fours pose threats to a value system rooted in humility, temperance, and self-negation.

I was curious about how this archetype looks when this concept of an “authentic self” is removed, so I asked Claude Opus for an opinion. Here is what the ghost of language said:

We could also frame it as a sensitivity to the flavors of existence - a highly attuned palate for the subtleties of feeling and meaning, the shades and textures of being. As a Four, you're like a tuning fork for the emotional frequencies around you, and your self-expression is a way of translating those frequencies into form, of making the invisible visible.

Reader, I sat back satisfied, named, aligned with my nature. Finally, I have found somebody who understands and appreciates me, exactly the way I am.

[Preview image: from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).]