This is one in a series of posts about my recent interest in the “Enneagram of Personality,” and how Type Four is a perfect fit for me, and also offers me insight and potential growth. For more information about this series, see the first post here.

“Don’t mistake melancholy for depression. The Four’s pining and wistfulness has a bittersweet quality to it.” (Ian Morgan Cron & Suzanne Stabile, The Road Back to You, 153)

Okay. So diagnoses in mental health are often very difficult to come by. So much of it is based on self-reporting, and that’s hard to quantify. How sad am I? How anxious am I? At what point does garden-variety anxiety transition into pathology?

Most of my time in therapy was spent without a diagnosis, or with a generic catch-all just put there so my insurance would cover visits. (Right now, I have a diagnosis of “Major Depressive Disorder.”) I’ve tried to figure out my own diagnosis myself, as a way to try to understand myself better.

• Did I have seasonal affective disorder? I don’t think so – winter isn’t really my worst time.
• I started to notice how anxious I often felt, and I wondered, did I have depression that sometimes manifests as anxiety, or anxiety that sometimes manifests as depression?
• After my first child was born, I fell into a really deep depression, and I did some research and discovered that there really is such a thing as “male post partum depression,” and I wondered if I had that?
• Did I have persistent depressive disorder (PDD, formerly known as dysthymia), which is a low-level depression that lasts for years instead of months?
• And so forth…

The self-diagnosis that really stuck with me was something called “double depression.” This is a combination of PDD and Major Depressive Disorder. This diagnosis would mean that I had a “baseline” of low-level depression all the time, and on top of that I would sometimes have major depressive episodes. That made sense to me. It explained why I had really bad moments, but also why things always seemed off. Why I always leaned toward sadness, but wasn’t always in crisis. Double depression, that must be it.

I don’t believe that anymore. Reading about Enneagram Type Four has helped me to see that melancholy isn’t the same as depression. Melancholy is finding a strange sort of comfort in things that are sad. Melancholy is seeing darkness as a form of light, the off-kilter cousin of happiness. I am absolutely melancholy. I love cloudy, overcast November days. I love deep and sad music. I find sorrow to be like a warm blanket I can wrap myself in. There is so much meaning and beauty in the darkness, and I love it there.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s depression. It’s one way that my Four-ness manifests. I’m emo. I’m goth. I’m dark and moody. That’s just who I am, and I love that part of me. And it’s normal; it’s not a sign of a problem. However, separate from that, I also have major depressive disorder, which causes me a lot of pain and headache, from time to time. And which is managed through medication and therapy.

And I’m just starting now to see a glimpse that maybe, just maybe, my mental illness doesn’t have to be so central to my identity. Maybe, just maybe, my identity includes melancholy, but not depression. Maybe I can start seeing myself that way. I’m not there yet, but I’m glimpsing it. And it’s thanks to reading about the Enneagram.

Image by Craiyon.