A heart on the sleeve kind of a day

I had a little enneagram read today.  My intentions are to read about it often, to remind myself why I am how I am, but I never remember.  As usual, today it opened a tunnel of understanding which had me crying (not sobbing, just a few regretful tears) over breakfast as I tried to explain it to Jbird.  Huh.  Now, purely because I have nothing else to write about, I'm going to put it out there for you all to see.  Hopefully that won't feel too awkward.

I think I'm a number six, a loyalist.  I'm not yet willing to commit to this number because I haven't investigated the other numbers and a test I did was inconclusive.  But it does explain a lot.  Loyalists hold onto friendships and beliefs for all they're worth.  They are our safety, security, pillars of strength. Without these pillars, we crumble.  In the same breath, we are not very good at letting in new friends or beliefs, as we're extremely busy defending those old ones.

If I look at my life historically, I can remember a few snapshots of this.  The story goes that my mother picked me from school when I was five.  She said Say goodbye to your friends, Anna, it's time to go now.  <I feel as though I remember this incident, as though I can see the classroom and my first yellow schoolbag> My answer was They're not MY friends.  For Pete's sake, Annabel, they were your only friends - but they were new to me and not in my sphere yet.  At the beginning of the second year that I lived in Bangladesh, a whole bunch of newbies came in.  They were all excited about the adventure that is Dhaka.  I didn't do well making friends with many of those newbies.  I thought it was because I was tired, jaded from that crazy time, ready to go home.  I wasn't.  I was mourning the friends that had just left, writing to them every day.  Poor newbies, they didn't really stand a chance. And here I am in Bloomington, struggling to connect to people, in fact, resisting connection.  But really, I'm holding onto what has been, the communities that I have known.  Huh.  

That's not to say that I don't welcome new people into the folds of my communities.  I do, I'm extremely good at it because I believe in community.  I am a community builder.  Does that sound too contradictory?  I think this all might have something to do with why I deactivated my facebook account this week.  As a loyalist, I keep reaching out to those that I have known and loved but they're (understandably) entrenched in living their current lives.  It's time for me to live here.  Make the most of what is currently available to me.  Do I sound convincing?  I'm really trying!

Hello, happy sunshine.

As to my unwillingness to accept my number, number sixes can never make decisions without a host of people confirming their decisions for them.  So it's a pretty normal thing, really, for me not to be able to make up my mind.