Please welcome today’s guest writer, J Andrew Gilbert. Andrew graduated (online) from Calvin in 2020 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and minor in writing. They currently live in Brazil and are interested in exploring topics around mental health, visual experiences, mindfulness and meditation, and the playful world of the imagination. They will always believe the blue chicken exists.

When we look around, there are quite a bit of people who are wondering about who they are. The gift and weight of our time and different socio-economic privileges are that we’re told to find ourselves, to be ourselves, to bring ourselves into existence. Or maybe it’s just me that feels this way. While many find a form of refuge or a blueprint to follow in personality types, others fight them away like they’re a plague. Two that I’m most familiar with are the Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram, but some will alternatively point to different ones that they consider better. And then there are those who you just hear a buzzing whisper of disdain and dislike for these sorts of systems or categories or really the “boxes” that we put humans inside.

The Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, and all the other typing systems do have their issues. Issues that I think are intrinsic to any system that seems to try and organize human behavior. Scientifically it’s difficult to assess their accuracy in actually “prescribing” a personality, often people not getting similar results for their test throughout their lifetime. Personality types are also human simplifications, which always will fall prey to the malice of generalization. As much as I believe we can begin to describe our experiences through 16 different boxes of MBTI system or 9 different types (27 if we take into account the subtypes) for the Enneagram, each human is unique and their story will follow its own path shaped by their past and the community and relationships they develop. We seem to be obsessed with our uniqueness, even when we’re fairly similar as well, all things considered. 

Both of these personality systems, and I imagine several others as well, are highly informed and determined by definitions of linguistics and cultural context. Personally I’ve seen shifts in my personality depending a bit on cultural contexts; in living between Brazil and the USA, these different settings activate different aspects of me. I often think cultural shifts and the use of language to try and describe our experiences may lead many of us to self-attest differently. And linguistics is highly connected to culture. Words like “introverted,” “energetic,” and “emotional” have different cultural meanings and values attributed to them, which may make one person not connect to one or another word of their description. Even the value we’ve assigned to introvertedness has shifted these past years with books like Quiet by Susan Cain being released. 

But I’ve always been one to appreciate these systems. I got introduced to Myers-Briggs around the age of ten when my mom first gave us a Myers-Briggs test. She sat us down and told us how these questions and exercises could help us better understand ourselves and grow. The book we worked with connected each of the personality binaries from the Myers-Briggs with greek mythological gods. The types had stories and experiences connected to them. In some way it approached us to the system, made it more malleable to our young minds. We still felt in control, which I think is important. The system can’t control or determine our behavior; it can only help inform us for our next steps and help us find words to explain even to ourselves what we’re doing. 

And I think that’s key to what these systems give. I honestly don’t know that they give us any hard truths, in the scientific way of seeing truth. But they give us language to work with—language that helps us understand first ourselves but then others as well and through this process connects us with them better. With me and my brother, it didn’t solve all our problems. But it did help us understand where the other person came from, and slowly, through much work, to treat each other better.

J Andrew Gilbert