I’ve always had a difficult time knowing what to tell people to get me for my birthday. It’s a question that comes up every year, but I think I tend to take it a little more seriously than they do. I get real deep real fast: What kind of gift would accurately reflect who I am as a person? If I commit to a certain gift, how will I know that I won’t feel differently about it tomorrow? Does picking a certain gift make me the kind of person who picks that gift? I’m already worried about being authentic, but my family just wants to know if I need new socks or something. A similar thing happens if you ask me my favorite color, something that happens far too infrequently as an adult, in my opinion (for the record, it’s currently indigo).

This kind of unprompted introspection has been a habit of mine for a long time. When I was in early high school, I found a book at home about the enneagram, and for a few weeks I became very invested in learning all about it, and all about myself. My parents were already familiar with it, and with their help I took some quizzes, talked about it, and settled on my type: seven. It fit with the descriptions, and my parents agreed that it made a whole lot of sense. I was excitable but impatient, talkative and curious but not very well-focused. I liked trying new things, and I hated being bored.

In the enneagram, settling on a type usually comes as a result of making some fairly serious, deep discoveries about your inner life and motivations. But I was barely out of middle school, so these more surface-y, behavioral traits were all the evidence I had. In essence, I had worked backwards, deciding what my type was and then drawing conclusions as to what that must mean about my inner life. I was fairly convinced that, like other type sevens, I was perpetually unable to achieve satisfaction and deeply afraid of being trapped in pain. Certainly, as a fourteen year-old, these would have been impressive revelations, had they been as accurate as I believed.

Eventually though, my enneagram phase tapered out, and I returned to my normal teen life fairly satisfied that I had learned a lot about myself. In retrospect, I don’t think I was actually wrong about this. I did learn a lot about myself, or at least about my behavior. But I also did turn out to be wrong about what was going on deeper inside my personality, and it would be some years before I figured that out.

In my sophomore year of college, I rediscovered the enneagram. I started poring over books again, watching old lectures on Youtube, reading forum posts—this time with years of my adolescence to reflect on.

At first, I really didn’t want to admit that I was actually a four. It was the type that seemed the most annoying to me in concept, and the “strengths” didn’t seem like they were worth the flaws. I was okay with the idea of being sensitive and expressive, but descriptors like “dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental” felt off-putting. But the evidence kept piling up, and I started to realize that these things were true after all. I couldn’t deny that I felt different from others, and that I needed to be seen as different. I knew that I had a habit of basking in feelings of sadness or melancholy, and I had to admit that one of my main strategies for trying to garner attention was… to withdraw. Fortunately, as uncomfortable as it was in the beginning, it started becoming pretty satisfying to find words that spoke to my life experiences in a way that nothing else quite had before. Lines like “If their identity is based on feelings, and their feelings are always changing, then their identity is always changing” or “taken too far, the desire to ‘be themselves’ can lead fours to feel that the rules and expectations of ordinary life do not apply to them,” though embarrassing, gave me this sweet sense of self-revelation that made me feel relieved and enlightened all at the same time.

And a similar thing happened again not long after, when I was diagnosed with ADHD. Another whole set of previously inexplicable life experiences now had an explanation and, as an added bonus, those explanations had significant overlap with many of my misconceptions about me being a seven. Being scattered, being unfocused, being impatient, feeling understimulated—these were not strictly aspects of my personality, but rather products of a neurological disability, and many of them could be directly treated by medication.

In the writing that exists about the enneagram, I’ve not seen much said about teen personality development. Nobody has a set age for when you “become” your type, but there are some sources that say the enneagram isn’t really effective as a tool until about age twenty, when you are fully finished with adolescence and just barely beginning to live into adulthood. This is exactly the age I was when I re-engaged the enneagram, and it certainly seemed a lot clearer then than it did when I was fourteen. In fact, most fully-fledged adults are at least reluctant to acknowledge their enneagram type—as I was—upon initial reflection. All that to say: I don’t begrudge my younger self for failing to recognize my type, because I’m not sure it would have been possible anyway. 

But nowadays, being able to frame myself as an enneagram four has helped me in a number of ways. In my inevitable bouts of introspection, it’s a good place to return to, somewhere I can pick up where I left off and keep building, getting into the more detailed aspects like wings and instinctual variants. It’s helped me embrace a fundamental emotionality with which I approach life, which in some other spaces is dismissed or even demonized. And it’s helped me recognize that identifying with my feelings in a particular moment—tying my identity too strongly to how I feel—is a trap that usually hurts more than it helps; but also that I can forgive myself when this happens.

It was 2019 when I picked up the enneagram again, and its importance to me has only grown since then. In those three years, I’ve discovered so much about myself, and I’m so much better for it. But today, I’m turning twenty-three, and I’m realizing that I have a lot of time left. So I have to imagine that means there’s a whole lot more to discover.

Philip Rienstra

Phil Rienstra (they/he) (’21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed an interest in labor rights and coffee. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, a fledgling dungeon master, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.