I'm gonna need you to stick with me through this one. It's going somewhere—honest—and I already split it in half from what it was originally, so you're welcome.
The Enneagram* has really taken off in my life and the lives of those closest to me. We have been having revelations left and right, unlike anything I've ever experienced. If you know me, you know that my entire life has been a quest for personal revelations and indications of how to grow better, almost (definitely? See below.) to the point of being obnoxious.
[Tangental Story: When I was 12 or 13 years old, I had three best friends: my sister Sarah, Jesse, and Ellie. We were close for lots of reasons (one of them being The Fire Fairy Story, which soon may have a hyperlink, because I think it's creeping back into my Becoming journey). Lately we'd been having issues of the typical petty, hormonal type, and I was done with it. I literally SAT US ALL DOWN and made everyone go around in a circle and tell something that bothered them about all the other people. My intention was to get everything out in the open so that we could deal with it, grow, and become stronger friends. However, this is when I learned that not everyone jives with this sort of confrontation. Everyone ended up mad at each other, no one wanted to work through things, and they still give me a good-natured hard time about "Stephanie's bashing circle" to this day XD]
Okay, wow, that really was a tangent. I'm supposed to be talking about being vulnerable. Maybe I'm stalling? Or maybe there's just so much context needed to do this subject justice.
I'm an Enneagram type Eight. Eights are passionate, assertive, dedicated to justice, and terrified of betrayal.
Since I last wrote about the Enneagram, I've been introduced to the "band" (it's just one guy, kind of like Owl City) Sleeping At Last and his Enneagram project (thanks, Garrett!). This man, Ryan, did months of intense research about each Enneagram type and wrote a song for each. Because every facet of each song is engineered to reflect its Enneagram type, he also has a podcast where he unpacks the elements of each song, from the lyrics, to the tempo, to the instruments, to the random "fingerprint" sounds buried in the music.
Throughout this commentary, an Enneagram expert named Chris has segments where he unpacks each type a little bit. Gabe and I listened to the podcast on his type (Four) and my type (Eight) in the car last weekend. There was a lot of blushing and side-eyeing each other when the nail was hit so squarely on the head we felt it almost physically. [Cassidy has since started listening to the podcast on her type (Nine) and is, and I quote, "shook."]
A LOT (most? all?) of the things said about Eights resonated with me, but one concept stuck out above all the rest. It can be broken into two quotes from the podcast, one of which I'm covering in this post:
1) "For [an Eight], the first lesson, and maybe the hardest lesson, is this movement from transparency to vulnerability."
I heard this podcast three days after my ladies' small group leader, Lindsay, had dropped a bomb that she probably didn't even see land on me:
"I'm very good at being open," she said in passing. "But I'm not good at being vulnerable."
If I'd been mentally walking along, this stopped me in my tracks.
Wait, those are DIFFERENT?! I screamed in my head.
My whole life, I've assumed I was great at being vulnerable. I've assumed vulnerability was something I didn't struggle with at all. I am perfectly comfortable talking about things that make most people squirm. If you ask me, I'll tell you intimate details about literally anything. This blog (and all the others I've had throughout the years) is full of my being what I thought was "vulnerable," but turns out is just "open" or "transparent."
Then I got to thinking: if all I've ever done is be open, do I even know how to be vulnerable?
And the answer, I think, is "no." Or, better, "not yet."
In Part 2, I'm digging into the conversation with Gabe and Cassidy that followed this self-revelation, and the second quote from the podcast that mentally stopped me in my tracks.
~Stephanie
* If you want to find out your Enneagram type, YOU MUST READ (at least a little) ABOUT ALL NINE TYPES AND FIGURE IT OUT FOR YOURSELF. Internet quizzes WILL NOT tell you your type. I have actually removed the hyperlink to an internet quiz in my original Enneagram post because it proved so ineffective at helping my friends, family, and self identify our types.
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