I’ve been doing some exploration of the “Enneagram of Personality” lately, and I have discerned that I am very clearly an Enneagram Four. This has been a fascinating journey, as I’ve found insights about who I am, why I might be this way, and how I can grow. This is one of a series of posts reflecting on my experience with the Enneagram. For more information about this series, see the first post here.

“Being inauthentic is totally unacceptable to Fours.” (Suzanne Stabile, The Path Between Us, 121)

When I was a freshman in college, I thought it would be lots of fun to become a DJ on the college FM radio station. I have always loved music, and I was discovering, discerning, and developing a particular style. It’s always been important to me to “curate” the music I like. There’s a moment in the movie High Fidelity that sticks in my mind. The movie is about a young man named Rob who runs a record store, and how he is trying to figure his life out. In one scene, Rob’s employee Dick arrives at Rob’s apartment to see if he’d like to come along to a concert. But he quickly discovers that the floor of Rob’s apartment is covered in hundreds of records, stacked in piles. Dick says, “Looks like you’re … reorganizing your records. What is this? Chronological?” Rob says, “No.” Dick says, “It’s not alphabetical.” Rob says, “Nope.” Dick asks, “What is it?” Rob says proudly, “Autobiographical.”

That’s how I always wanted to think of myself – somebody who knew music so well that I could tell my life story with nothing but the organization of my own extensive record collection.

So – I was a freshman, interested in getting on the air as a DJ. The rule was that you had to log a certain number of hours on the AM radio station (which had virtually no listenership) first, kind of like an internship, before you could get an FM license. No problem. I got a weekly slot on the AM station and played the music I liked. I was enjoying it – playing a lot of my own CDs that I brought along, as well as trying some new stuff that I was discovering in the stacks at the station.

But then there was the day that an acquaintance of mine came to the station with me. She asked if she could come along, and I said sure. She brought a bunch of her own music, stuff I didn’t really like. She asked me to play some of it on the air. I said, “Sure, I can play a request for you.” Then she asked me to play more. I started to get uncomfortable as I played more and more of her music. I started to make reference to it whenever I would go on the air between songs, saying things like, “Just a reminder – this is an all-request show tonight” and “I don’t even know half the songs I’m playing” and “Hey, this isn’t my music tonight – this is all going out by request.”

I don’t know where that was coming from. I was spinning records on the college AM station, which had a total audience of two or three. I was just getting practice in working the equipment and following the protocols. If I was being judged at all, it wasn’t on my musical choices, but rather on my ability to act like a DJ. Yet somehow I could not let go of this – it felt so wrong for me to play things that weren’t my own, it just felt wrong. It felt inauthentic. I felt like being a DJ was something artistic, a way to share who I was. It would be as if I were writing this blog as someone else. Writing is my art, my way of getting my insides out. That’s what I thought I was doing in the radio studio. And it just felt inappropriate, uncomfortable, inauthentic to do it the way I was doing it that night.

Learning about Enneagram Fours is helpful to me in understanding this side of me. It means that I wasn’t being a jerk that night – at least not at the heart of what was happening. Sure, I didn’t deal with it all that well. I was seventeen, and I had a great deal of maturing to go. The choices I made and the way I responded weren’t the best, but the feeling I had made complete sense. My inner reaction was reasonable. I had to be authentic. I still have that today. I still have to be myself at all costs. It’s part of why I am so open and vulnerable about my inner life – I honestly don’t understand why I shouldn’t be. It’s not from a sense of exhibitionism, but rather a sense of authenticity. If you want to know who I am, here I am – take it or leave it. If you aren’t interested, that’s your decision. But I’ve just never seen the purpose of having masks. I’ve learned that boundaries can be important – you don’t need to let everyone in on everything – but masks? Nah. That’s just my Fourness, I suppose.

Image by Bruno from Pixabay