For the Personality Quiz Girlies
The one going a little too hard into enneagrams, magazine quizzes and that pesky chronic illness.
I’ve been obsessed with personality tests for as long as I can remember.
From Myers-Briggs to the quizzes in my favorite teen magazines growing up (YM and Seventeen, thank you very much) and everything in between, I’ve always loved anything that seems like an opportunity to better understand myself. Horoscopes? Absolutely. Career assessments? Sure, why not. It’s like I have this innate need to keep digging until I hit on exactly what makes me (and others) tick. Self-reflection isn’t enough. I want to make sense of why I am the way I am and confirmation, I suppose, that I’m not alone — in seeing the world a certain way and the aspects of life that I hyper-value over others, or just an excuse for being extra *insert any adjective here.*
The reality is that I spent the majority of my childhood and adolescence not really feeling different, but rather just quietly knowing I was. Growing up with medical appointments as frequent and reliable as most kids get ice cream will do that. It wasn’t weird to me, didn’t make me sad, and I never felt like an outsider… it was more just this fact-based understanding, for as long as I can remember. I was not the same as all my friends, I knew I never would be, and that was okay. It was just the way it was. I knew I was mostly the same — 90% probably — but they could do things like go to sleep-away camp and extend their vacations without a worry, and not have to sit out gym classes because of vague health reasons or leave school at lunch every couple of weeks because of unmovable doctor appointments. So I tried to blend in whenever I could, lean into the parts of myself that felt “normal,” and I don’t know… maybe that’s why I instinctively felt compelled to fill out a quiz promising to tell me more about who I was meant to be or study my horoscope in CosmoGirl with the thoroughness of an anthropologist doing research — reaching for anything else that could bring a connection to normalcy, and tangibly show me how I was actually a lot like other people, despite the significantly unchangeable way I knew I wasn’t. And maybe it was also for an attempt to grasp some certainty — ways to peer through a keyhole into an alternate version of myself and my life, and find a guarantee — albeit a flimsy one — of who I could become, no matter how uncertain or lonely it sometimes felt being the only person I knew in my daily life living with a chronic illness.
I do far less magazine quizzes as an adult (unfortunately), but I still have this fascination with self analysis. I love to read things about my astrological sign and enneagrams, and if you were to ask me to take some random personality test about what my favorite color or ice cream topping says about me, I’d say yes in a heartbeat. I’m always a little skeptical now, but still — I want to know. What does loving the color yellow say about me???
Different than perhaps my motives as a kid, but also kind of the same.
I’ve never thought much about all of this until last week, after I found myself carefully listening to every word of an episode about enneagrams from the “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast. I was unexpectedly captivated, and found myself rewinding to make sure I was catching everything the guest was saying. I had taken an enneagram assessment a few years ago, back when enneagrams had started to gain popularity, and even though I didn’t really know much about what they were supposed to mean, I’d committed that personality type to memory. At the time, that result had made sense to me and seemed like a nice enough personality type to be associated with (2, the helper). Listening to the podcast last week, though, I found myself lost in thought about whether or not I felt like what the guest was describing about 2s actually sounded like me after all. When the episode ended, I sought out another enneagram assessment online and retook it, and then the strangest thing happened — I got a different result than I had a few years ago. I was flabbergasted. I was the same person, wasn’t I? The result I got this time ended up being the number that the guest from the podcast had said she’d least want to be — a 1 (the reformer). Excuse me?
This sounds so silly, but I found myself having something of a mini identity crisis. I started to read about what people with enneagram type 1s are usually like. I read the description out loud to my husband, eyes narrowed, saying something like, “This doesn’t sound like me, does it?” but it was all relatable…just largely about the parts of myself that I’ve never wanted to claim too tightly. My rigidness, my relentless drive for perfection in myself, my love of the rules.
Everything I’ve spent much of my life trying to laugh away or gloss over with exclamation points and lighthearted “no worries.” The parts of me I see every day but still somehow hoped no one else noticed.
And, maybe most of all, I couldn’t get over that my personality was apparently rooted in a type that someone had said was, in their opinion, the worst. The recovering people-pleaser in me struggled to sit with that, despite the fact that I didn’t know that podcast guest from a banana, and that what I was literally getting worked up over was nothing more than a gussied up personality quiz. (No offense to all the enneagram truthers reading this.) What does it mean if I’m made up of the characteristics that someone else thinks are hard to like or even love?
In the end, it doesn’t really matter what my enneagram type is or isn’t, does it? What matters, actually, is that I let myself be okay with the traits of my personality — and the parts of myself — that I cringe to hear repeated back to me. The ones that I’ve shied away from accepting or squint away in the mirror because I don’t want to seem difficult or hard to please or any more different than I already am.
The ultimate irony is that the aspects of myself that last week’s test brought into the light are largely ones that grew out of being a person who’s had a chronic illness their entire life — all of which no astrological sign or personality quiz could ever explain away. This semi-silly personality reckoning has reminded me, though, that 30-something year old me has drawn stars around her scars, and the parts of myself I was always afraid would make me unlikeable are the parts that have been hard-won and are, in their own ways, tiny victories… regardless of what any personality test may say to the contrary.
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This essay was a real journey, and started out really as just an angsty retort to “getting” the enneagram result that allegedly no one wants. In the end, it taught me more about myself (both the 30s-something version and who I was as a kid) than anything else probably could have, and if you made it to the end of this spiral, gosh! Thank you.
If you’re in need of something to listen to, I can’t recommend the recently released Taylor Swift album Speak Now (Taylor’s Version…duh) — I especially love the songs from the vault. Continuing my obsession with Noah Kahan, I have to also beg you listen to his new collab with Post Malone. SO good. xo
Thanks for reading,
Joelle
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This is so interesting! It makes me want to go take one of those tests. I feel like most of the tests I have taken have been in relation to employer retreats, especially in the nonprofit setting, like in relation to how you work with a team…also while reading that book “what color is your parachute” while trying to figure out career options post college. It has always been career related. But I think it’d be useful to actually read a few in relation to my actual personal life!