Who We've Been Dying To Become

I turned Twenty Eight last week and we are approaching the end of 2019. I am not where I expected to be. I am single and for the first time in a long time I don't feel the need to be in a relationship to feel complete. I post on instagram a picture of myself every New Years with a declaration of what I wanted that year to be. I said I wanted 2019 to be a year where I loved people better and something that I've learned is that for me to be able to love other people better, I need first to learn how to love myself better. 

Two years ago I stumbled upon the Enneagram at a leadership meeting - it is a great tool especially for team building. Then we had an entire semester class on learning about it and since then I've gone way into the deep end of learning about it. I am a dominant type Four with a Three wing. I'm the individualist/romantic with the achiever/performer wing. I hate it. For about nine months I told myself and other people that I was a dominant type Nine, the peacemaker. Until my best friend nudged me ever so kindly into reading more about the type Four... The moment I read that chapter on The Road Back To You, I got angry and I felt exposed. Who found my hidden blogs? Who's read my journals (which I've kept since 4th grade)?! Who said it was okay to write about it in a book for the whole world to see? YOU MEAN THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE LIKE ME?!!?!?! I am the poster child Type Four, intimate with melancholy and withdrawing to myself. Upon this epiphany, I locked myself in my dorm room for a whole week, only to come out for sustenance. What do I do with this information? 

The singer and songwriter, Sleeping At Last, creates an incredible album called Atlas where he chronicles the human life in form of beautifully intentional pieces of music and he dedicates almost an entire year to researching each Enneagram type, writing songs in the perspective of each type about being honest with oneself and also finding hope in our self discovery. As a four, I take everything personally, and so when I first heard his song, "Four" I felt offended. HAHA. I felt like I was being mocked for my love of poetry, and nostalgia. 

"what if we already are
who we’ve been dying to become
in certain light i can plainly see

a reflection of magnificence

hidden in you
maybe even in me" 

I realized that I completely missed the point of the song. I thought I was a Nine because of learned behavior of avoiding conflict and tension. But I feel it always inside of me, the desire to create something out of the tension, the pain, the confusion, the joy, the depth of every emotion I feel inside of me. I want to string beautiful words together, to play notes, to paint colors, to make movement, to make people feel. I feel it all, all of the time inside of me. I FEEL EVERYTHING and it never ends, I just want to explode sometimes. Jonathan David Helser has this quote, "Music exists because of Tension."  I don't want to avoid that, I want to embrace that and use it to create beauty.

In health, Fours are deeply and profoundly creative and able to open themselves up in healthy vulnerability to others. We are able to invite other people into being honest with their emotions through our own vulnerability. Emotions are beautiful. Vulnerability is beautiful, Tension can be beautiful. 

If I want to love people better, I have to learn how to love myself first. If I want to love people better, then I mustn't withdraw, but I must learn to lean in and open up because it's all inside of me, everything I ever want to be. God made me this way, He's put every single emotion that I feel inside of me. Creativity is inside of me, uniqueness is inside of me. What if I already am, who I've been dying to become?