Life Will Be the Death of Me Page 4
“Yeah, no,” I said. “That’s not me. I’m into conflict.”
The people who live in sadness tend to be depressives and can struggle with that their entire lives. They typically have huge amounts of empathy for others. These people also tend to love animals more than the average person loves animals. They are sensitive to others and are typically great listeners, but again, they can also have serious issues with depression.
“Yeah, I’m anger.”
“Okay, so you’re anger. Let’s start there.”
He explained that the Enneagram system starts by identifying which of the three states of mind you are most closely aligned with and then broadens into a total of nine different personality types.
“I can describe each type to you and we can try to figure out which one you are, which will help you understand why you do some of the things you do, and what areas you can strengthen—that’s called your ‘growth edge.’ ”
Dan went through each of the nine personality types and told me to think of them like spokes on a wheel, which was also his analogy to meditation: spokes on a wheel. Start with your breath, then your hearing, your sight, and then keep going around the wheel to your internal organs and then your external body parts. I appreciated this because it was another visual aid—something I’ve learned over the years is the most effective way for me to digest a concept I’m unfamiliar with. Everything was all about spokes on a wheel. The Wheel of Awareness is what he calls it. Dan liked wheels, and my guess is that in a past life he drove a wagon—on wheels.
The Enneagram captured my interest because I respected the person who was telling me about it. When going through the nine different personality types, you’ll find that some include characteristics you recognize in yourself, but there are usually one or two traits that stand out as definitely not part of your personality. Ultimately, the number that describes you the most accurately is the one in which all the traits apply to you. There are tests you can take online to find your number—some more extensive than others—but it is ultimately about reading each number’s strengths and weaknesses, and being honest with yourself, about yourself.
Dan also explained that, typically, people feel drawn to two numbers at first. Then you revisit those two numbers, paying attention to the weaknesses of each. That’s when you are usually able to discern which number more aptly describes you, and lock into one of the numbers, which is what happened to me.
When we got to number seven, I started to hear things that sounded like me.
7
THE ENTHUSIAST
Enneagram Type Seven
The Busy, Variety-Seeking Type:
Spontaneous, Versatile, Acquisitive, and Scattered
TYPE SEVEN IN BRIEF
Sevens are extroverted, optimistic, versatile, and spontaneous. Playful, high-spirited, and practical, they can also misapply their many talents, becoming over-extended, scattered, and undisciplined. They constantly seek new and exciting experiences, but can become distracted and exhausted by staying on the go. They typically have problems with impatience and impulsiveness. At their best: they focus their talents on worthwhile goals, becoming appreciative, joyous, and satisfied.
Basic Fear: Of being deprived and in pain
Basic Desire: To be satisfied and content—to have their needs fulfilled
Key Motivations: Want to maintain their freedom and happiness, to avoid missing out on worthwhile experiences, to keep themselves excited and occupied, to avoid and discharge pain.
Type Seven sounded a lot like me, until I heard the description of Type Eight, and realized that I’m not positive enough to be a seven; I’m more of a half-glass-period person. I don’t see a glass as half empty or half full—it’s just half; it could go either way.
8
THE CHALLENGER
Enneagram Type Eight
The Powerful, Dominating Type:
Self-Confident, Decisive, Willful, and Confrontational
TYPE EIGHT IN BRIEF
Eights are self-confident, strong, and assertive. Protective, resourceful, straight-talking, and decisive, but can also be ego-centric and domineering. Eights feel they must control their environment, especially people, sometimes becoming confrontational and intimidating. Eights typically have problems with their tempers and with allowing themselves to be vulnerable. At their best: self-mastering, they use their strength to improve others’ lives, becoming heroic, magnanimous, and inspiring.
Basic Fear: Of being harmed or controlled by others
Basic Desire: To protect themselves (to be in control of their own life and destiny)
Key Motivations: Want to be self-reliant, to prove their strength and resist weakness, to be important in their world, to dominate the environment, and to stay in control of their situation.
“I’m an eight.”
“Okay, you’re an eight, then.”
“Do you think I’m an eight?”
“That’s the thing about the Enneagram,” he said. “You can’t assess someone else. Each person has to assess themselves.”
“That’s what I do,” I told Dan. “I’m a fixer. I charge in and clean up messes. Everyone’s except my own. What are the bad qualities about being an eight?”
He reassured me that there were no bad numbers, and I reassured him that I wasn’t sensitive enough to care if some numbers were bad or good, but that if we were going to work on my weaknesses, we needed to get real.
Dan told me about a conference he attended where he sat alone with groups of only sevens or groups of only eights and had asked them all what the best-kept secret of being that number was—the one thing that each number needed to work on the most.
“And?”
“All the eights said that their hidden secret is that eights lack empathy,” Dan said.
Lack of empathy. Huh.
“Like a Republican?”
I had to think about the difference between empathy and sympathy. I can be too sympathetic to people. I’m a sucker for a sob story and I will lavish sympathy on any stranger who needs a hand. But empathy? I had to talk that through with him.
“Empathy and sympathy? What’s the distinction, again?”
“Sympathy is feeling bad for someone or for their situation. Sympathy is more like pity. Empathy is imagining what it’s like to be in that person’s shoes. Thinking about what it feels like to be another person and the understanding that their experiences and outlooks may have been unlike your own. Actually, thinking about what it’s like to be them.”
Dan asked me about those instances when I show up for people I care about and if, while I’m doing it, I think about what it feels like to be in that person’s predicament.
The answer was no.
I went to their bedside, or doorstep, or lay in bed with any of my friends who needed a friend in order to do one thing: fix the situation.
To show up repeatedly, time and time again. Whenever that happens, my sympathy is in full gear, but rarely if ever do I consider what it’s like to be that person in that moment. I want to wrap their injury and patch them up. I never stop showing up, but I don’t put myself in their shoes. Often we think we are showing up for someone, when really all we’re doing is showing everyone how great we are at showing up.
Lack of empathy.
That hit me over the head.
I have no empathy. Yes! That’s right! Like how I feel about people who like room temperature water. Some people don’t care about the temperature of their drink or the quality of ice. I don’t understand those people. Like, when flight attendants hand out room temperature Dasani water, I want to throw it out the airplane window. I’ve always looked sideways at this community of humans who are okay with room temperature water, or—God forbid—prefer it. Or people who like pineapple on their pizza or, for t
hat matter, any other hot food with pineapple on it.
Rosemary annoys the shit out of me too, but everyone else seems to fucking love it. Then again, I love cilantro, and people can have a visceral reaction to that, and I don’t get that at all. How could anyone hate cilantro? It feels like I just need to meet more people who hate rosemary as much as I do. But mostly everything and everyone, at some point, ends up annoying me. And now I know why. I’m not thinking about them. I have gone through life failing to understand why people have different reactions to things than I do.
Lack of empathy made total sense. I never understand why everyone doesn’t just do what I would do: Get up and trudge on. Power through. So: I have sympathy, but not empathy. I also have zero sentimentality. It’s almost like I’m allergic to it—like, when people talk about missing an old car or a home they’ve sold…I just want to tell them to please move on to the next topic, quickly. I can’t relate at all.
I was on board with being an Eight who lacked empathy. Doorways in my brain were opening.
I realize the hypocrisy of me espousing a philosophy that used a number to describe my personality, for fuck’s sake, but I do feel passionately about takeaways, especially honest ones, and this was the first time a professional had told me something about myself that was negative. I had a takeaway. No empathy was huge. That was something tangible that I could learn from—a growth edge. I didn’t care how hokey this sounded; the bottom line was that I had more information. Finding out what my weaknesses were opened the floodgates. Even if it’s a theory or a little astrology- or numerology-adjacent, if it rings true with you, then it is true to you, and that’s really all anyone needs in order to forge ahead and improve themselves. I needed to get past a roadblock, and understanding I had no empathy was a big first step.
• • •
METANOIA
Metanoia.
Noun.
A profound transformation in one’s outlook.
USAGE: “You’ll need to rethink everything. Here you’ll need to resort to old-style metanoia, to radical rethinking and alteration.”
—Alois Brandstetter, The Abbey (Ariadne Press, 1998)
Finding out I lacked empathy was my metanoia.
I spent the next few weeks recalling one instance after another where I now recognized my lack of empathy.
I had been in London with one of my best friends, who happens to be a gay man. We went to see the movie Call Me by Your Name. Five minutes in, I leaned over, irritated, and asked, “Is this a gay love story?”
“Yes,” he hissed, incredulously. I hadn’t known what the movie was about going in, and I was taken by surprise.
“Oh, my God. You’re so selfish,” I whispered loudly, while I shoveled popcorn down my throat. The ludicrousness of my comment hit us both at the same time, and we started laughing so disruptively, we had to remove ourselves ten minutes into the movie.
Gay people have had to sit through straight people’s stories since the beginning of time. Had I ever thought about that? Nope. Never occurred to me.
Lack of empathy was everywhere I went. This was an exciting development.
* * *
• • •
I had been seeing Dan for just over a month—about two times a week—and I felt like I was making substantial progress in terms of not being reactive. I was now thinking about things before saying them, which prior to me seeing this doctor I had never even contemplated as a possible way to behave. I was in a particularly good mood that day when I walked into his office, excited to tell him that I was getting somewhere with my behavior, and that I actually enjoyed the three-minute meditation I had done that morning—that I might even be ready to bump it up to five minutes.
When I got to his office and sat down, Dan handed me an orange.
“I felt like you might want an orange today. I picked it from my tree.”
This was the moment I became undone.
In that moment, I fell apart at the proverbial seams.
Shoulders down, head bowed.
I sat and cried and shook and let my shoulders feel sorry for themselves and my heart ached and I moaned, loudly—like a wounded wolf. One with an injury that had scabbed over many times but had never properly healed. I had a deep infection.
My crying was acute, hysterical. It was the kind of guttural pain that could land you in the hospital. I cried, and cried, and cried, all while peeling my orange, with Dan sitting there looking at me like he had expected this all along. He handed me a box of tissues, which I used to clean up the juice that was squirting everywhere because, apparently, peeling an orange was another simple task that I had somehow magically forgotten how to do, and had instead been stabbing it with my fingernails.
I wanted to charge past my tears, to stop myself from crying in front of him—or anyone, for that matter—but he left me with no other avenues. I had no choice but to give in and let it rip and let him watch me crumble. Foam-at-the-mouth, snot-out-of-the-nose kind of crying. Nothing I’d ever want another person to see me do. All while still trying to maintain some sort of dignity by continuing to eat my orange, which was a mess with the makeshift plate I had made out of the tissues, and when I felt more tears coming my way, I gave up the life raft. I put the tissues and the half-molested orange in my lap and looked at his trustworthy, smarter-than-me eyes and saw in them what I had been longing for all along—pity. After thirty years of bottling up the deepest injury of my life, I was ready for someone to feel sorry for me.
* * *
• • •
We had met in a different room that day. Dan’s regular office was being used by someone else, so he warned me at our last appointment that we would have to meet in his other office, which we hadn’t done before. I remember thinking, What kind of a basket case does he think I am that he has to warn me about sitting in a different office?
I don’t know if it was the change of scenery, or if it was because the light was different, or that we were sitting at a table rather than in our regular two chairs—or if it was that simple act of kindness of him giving me an orange he had picked from his tree that elicited such a primal reaction inside me.
When I was finally able to collect myself, I said, “There’s nothing I hate more than room temperature fruit, and I almost never eat carbs, but I’m going to eat this orange, and thank you for bringing it to me.”
“You’re welcome.”
Then I exhaled for about ten minutes straight—putting myself back together—and when I was finally able to breathe normally again, he asked me what I was feeling.
“Anger,” I sobbed. “I’m so angry, and I’m so tired.”
“I bet,” he said. “I bet you are.”
“I need to tell you about the day my brother died, and what happened to my family.”
My brother was the first man I ever slept with. The night I came home from the hospital, my mom said that Chet, who was thirteen at the time, asked if he could sleep with me, to which my mom…agreed? Over the years, he told the story of not being able to sleep that whole night for fear of rolling over and crushing me. The better question—I’ve always thought—was why either of my parents allowed a thirteen-year-old boy to sleep with a two-day-old baby. That should give you some insight into how interested my parents were in raising children or, for that matter, using protection. They had six children, and it’s a miracle any of us are still breathing.
* * *
• • •
I heard him taking two steps at a time up to my mom’s room, so I ducked my head under the covers, where I was snuggling with my mother in our usual spot. My mom was the definition of a snuggler, and she always had some form of chocolate close by. A Snickers, or an Almond Joy, or a brownie wrapped in cellophane. Lying in bed with her was like sleeping with cotton candy.
“Where is she?”
Chet asked, menacingly, when he bombed through the bedroom door, smelling like the woods. My brother always smelled like a bonfire. He smelled like the beach and the woods all at the same time. He smelled like home.
“She’s not heeere,” my mom sang in the singsong, flirty way she spoke when she was being playful, which was a large percentage of the time.
“I don’t believe you,” he told her and then pinpointed exactly where my feet were, grabbed them, and dragged me out of the bed, until he was holding me upside down by my ankles, with my head an inch above the floor. I used my arms to climb up his legs, and then he spun me around until I was over his shoulders.
“Be careful, Chet,” my mom scolded my brother, which was silly because a) she knew I loved this, and b) my mother telling any of us to be careful didn’t even go in one ear and out the other—it just turned around and went right back into her mouth.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked me, as we bounded down the steps to the kitchen.
It was after ten P.M., and whenever Chet came home from work that late, he wanted cereal. When I was nine years old, preparing cereal felt culinary and also made me feel like I was running a household, which no one else in my family seemed to be doing at that point. I fancied myself a homemaker, taking care of my brood.
Being the youngest of six doesn’t beg a lot of service from your siblings; no one ever asked me for anything—but Chet did. I loved making him cereal when he came home late. I could make any kind of cereal. I knew the right milk-to-cereal ratio he preferred, so I’d fold a paper towel into a napkin (my parents had either never heard about napkins or they were able to buy paper towels cheaper and in bulk), and place a cereal spoon beside the bowl because, unlike anyone else in our family, I knew the difference between a cereal spoon and a teaspoon. (To this day, I always prefer a cereal spoon, even when I’m drinking tea.) Then we’d sit at the kitchen table and talk about our day—like a couple.