Welcome, all, to an Enneagram-centric post. I highly recommend drinking the Kool-Aid and figuring yourself out. Along with figuring out the rest of humanity. I’ve been researching and preaching the Enneagram since 2011, and I’m still only just now getting to the good stuff.
(And by “good,” I mean “gruesome.”)
I could barrel down a thousand different passages in the maze that is my life as a Four. I’ll pick just one for today.
A Four’s hallmark is losing oneself in fantasy. For Fours-Wing-Five, in particular, we tend to live in our heads — with our hearts manning the controls.
You might notice I don’t speak up much in groups. It’s because I’m always watching. Always analyzing. Always theorizing. And above all else, always, feeling. Feeling every little thing.
Why did he say that?
Why are they doing that?
Why is he like this and not like that anymore?
Why wasn’t this experience with him/them like last time? What changed? In him, in them, in me?
Why aren’t things with this person and those people like they used to be? Like they should be?
Why can’t real life be as good, as rich, as abundant, as fulfilling as it is in my fantasy world?
When real life gets hard and messy and not as it should be, I have an inner sanctum I return to, again and again. One rotted by dopamine-laced falsities.
A Matrix-like refuge of blissful ignorance. A cave of delightful deceit.
Things and other people aren’t the way they should be? Fine. Allow me to step back and recreate . . . everything.
My struggles to ground myself in reality can start innocently enough — a long, lost, Walter Mitty stare into nowhere, and many-a-folk have literally had to snap me out of it. “Where did you go?” a friend asked me once.
But my shadow side slinks beyond a lingering daydream.
It stretches far deeper, grows more desperate, down to my pornography habits and web encounters. Digital connections that steal my real identity, give it a fantastical new one.
To escape the real me, to create a fantasy version — it’s intoxicating. I don’t have another more apt word for it.
I’ve never been intoxicated by substance, but I have soared with the drive of dopamine like a morphine plunge when I escape to these far-off digital worlds, Fantasy Me saying and doing things Real Me shudders to rewrite, even to reconsider.
(It’s actually a counseling assignment that I’m not looking forward to completing.)
I hate coming back from these worlds. I always have to. I hate going there to begin with, but I also really hate coming back. Experiencing my fantasy withdrawal in this misshapen reality.
And so, the remedy for a Four’s ravenous fantasy life is doing something, multiple things, anything to ground oneself in reality.
Working out. Reading books. Texting someone. Calling someone. Hugging someone. A real person, not some made-up fantasy person.
Doing stuff. Instead of endlessly thinking stuff. Lost in the cave.
Some people think too much; others feel too much. As a Four-Wing-Five, I’m blessed with both a brain and a heart that won’t ever turn off.
Even when I drink in excess, I don’t get numb like some people. What even is numb? What’s that like?
No, I get sad. I drink, and I start to think about things — the way things were, the way things should be — and I feel sadder. The thoughts and feelings exponentially taking me to that cold familiar lair.
These last several months of pivots and reorientations to my new reality, living alone in my own apartment, there has been no fixing reality by fantasy. Only a worsening reality.
The only fix to this awful what-isn’t is a swift return to the what-actually-is. One Twitter user described it this way as a fellow Four-Wing-Five: “it’s a moment by moment leap of faith.”
I’ve never heard myself so perfectly described. Every moment, a fateful lunge.
But instead of thinking about doing CrossFit for the last two years, I’ve actually started doing CrossFit. Three hours of intensity every week. I’m grounding myself by wheezing on the literal ground those mornings.
Instead of thinking that maybe some day when I’m ready I’ll work on that next book, I’ve started working on that next book. It’s a volcanic mess, but so were my first two books after just a couple weeks. A long way yet to go. I’m grounding myself by writing on the literal ground of my lonely apartment.
Instead of thinking I really need to join a church group or recovery group or some other regular gathering of believers, I’m stepping out like a leap of faith and joining those groups. I’m acknowledging that meeting new people in group settings is the literal worst for a Four like me, and I am forcing myself to go.
I’m grounding myself with real-life people instead of false, digital ones.
My head and my heart keep swirling and beating that my fantasy life is better, so much better, than real life right now. Even as I take these definitive steps.
Just escape, I think, I feel, the thought, the feeling raging. Escape, if even for an hour. Even for a day. Even for a week or two. Any minute in Fantasy Life is better than a second in this Real Life wasteland.
And maybe it’s true. Maybe the fantasy life I dreamt up here three years ago, a life for myself and perhaps dozens more, is indeed way better than right now. It certainly feels that way.
But Fantasy Life is not Life. It’s not what I have. Can I even fairly compare the two?
I have this.
I only have this.
This here.
This now.
This what-isn’t.
I have a head and a heart that worry and weep for the what-isn’t. I can’t turn off either one.
And yet.
By considering the lost fantasy, by mourning the what-isn’t, allowing myself these minutes and hours, often amid the dead of Real Life 3am, I actually ground myself in the what-is, these tears soaking this cold hard soil below.
Loosening the dirt.
Sinking down.
Allowing room.
For whatever is meant to grow here.
