Sarajane Case - The Enneagram Letters: A Poetic Exploration of Who You Thought You Had to Be

contents

introduction

As life moves forward, we collect titles like categorization lint rollers. Every choice we make adds another clarifier onto our personality: parent, child, spouse, student, employee, type A/type B, introvert/extrovert, what you want to be when you grow up, what you do for a living, and so on.

Grabbing them up, unconsciously and consciously adding to the way we see and express ourselves. Adding to how others see and understand us. At times this feels useful. Were given a sense of understandingof not being alone. It provides language for how we tell people who we are: Hi, Im Sarajane, a stepmom, business owner, and extrovert who prefers to be alone and loves good coffee. This starts to take the place of getting to know one another and ourselves in intricate and complex ways. These categories so easily go from helpful to stifling in a matter of moments, no longer making us feel known and instead doing the oppositetelling us who we are even when weve moved beyond it or no longer experience ourselves that way.

The magic of the Enneagram is not in finding ourselves in these numbers, but rather in recognizing that the things we thought we had to be were never ours to carry.

There is a tremendous amount of relief available to us when we choose to allow ourselves the full range of the human experience, to operate from all nine types and all three centers.

This compilation of poems and essays is here as what I hope to be a soothing balm to the part of you that feels pressured to be perfect, lovable, successful, significant, capable, supported, happy, strong, or easy to get along with in order to have a place on Earth where you belong.

Its like the chrysalis and the butterfly, assuming that there was never anything wrong with the caterpillar. When we live inside of the constraints of our Enneagram type, we are settling for a life in a cocoon. Safe, purposeful, and limited.

This book is a compilation of poems and essays written to the nine different pressures of the Enneagram. The things we think we have to be in life in order to be worthy of love, success, or safety. We explore the idea that we each in our own way, and to varying degrees, experience the gravity of these nine pressures: perfection, like-ability, success, significance, competence, support, happiness, strength, and easygoingness.

Our Enneagram type is the gift weve given ourselves in an attempt to stay safe. Its a beautiful thing that has supported us thus far in life, but at some point, its time to let it go in order to recognize that what has served us is no longer what we need.

These poems and essays are my love letters, insights, and experiences poured out in response to the suffering Ive seen in individuals of different Enneagram types. At times, theyre a direct call to action and, at others, a meditative reflection on the type structure. My hope is that they serve as both a challenge and a healing balm in all of our journeys of being human.

The Enneagram Letters are my invitation into your expansion.

why i wrote this book

I started my self-help journey when I was really young. My middle school journals are filled with inspirational quotes and clipped-out pages of Chicken Soup for the Soul books.

At times, the messages learned through self-help are healing and inspiring. They make us feel more connected to life and to ourselves. Other times, they make us feel like were failing or like we arent quite living up to our own standards. With the Enneagram, sometimes it can feel so disorienting that its hard to tell whats growth and whats obsession.

Believe in yourself feels great when you hit a roadblock and need that extra internal motivation to keep pushing. It feels defeating when you are so far away from self-belief that the idea of believing in yourself feels impossiblelike a skill you need to learn but have no idea where to start.

Just keep going is beautiful when life is hard, and you need to remember to just put one foot in front of the other. But its debilitating when you are already burned out and what you really need to do is stop going for a second and breathe.

So often, self-help gurus online teach these things like they are magic pills you take to make life better, easier, and more fulfillinga get-rich-quick scheme for your soul. Yet, they neglect to share the struggles along the way, the ache in your gut when things arent so easy, and the emotional mountains you climb on this journey.

I see this happen with the Enneagram all the timeeven in my own life. We become so focused on the system and finding where we fit into the system and who we are supposed to be that we ignore how its making us feel. Or simply, we overthink it.

We ask questions, such as, If Im unhappy, can I really be a type seven? Or, If Im no longer fearful of conflict, am I truly a type nine?

This can lead to seeking to overidentify with our type structure to the point that growth isnt possible.

Or...

If youre like me, you start to associate your personality with being wrong. Like anything about your type is somehow a problem even though there are some truly beautiful traits you carry related to your Enneagram type. Like enjoying busy-ness feels like a failure when maybe it's just neutral.

In my opinion, self-help is best used from a healthy distance. When we start to examine ourselves under a microscope, things get blurry and weird and a little too intense.

We tend to forget the simple principle that self-help is meant to help us, to make life more enjoyable, and to aid in healthier relationships and better communication. Its not here to make us dizzy with self-awareness and obsessed with perfecting the way we show up in the world.

You are not a project to be tinkered with. You are a living, breathing being who is worthy of a life well lived, and sometimes that means engaging with self-help and, yes, even the Enneagram through the filters of:

Is this pouring love in?

Do I feel expanded by this?

Is this a healing balm?

Does this nurture me?

Is this improving my life?

And finally, How can I engage with this in a way that truly supports me?

Which brings me to the question I want to leave you with as you open the pages of this book: what if there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, and your growth work is simply about letting yourself be the truest, purest, most open version of who you are? How would your relationship to self-help change?

a brief introduction to the enneagram

The Enneagram is a system of nine unique personality types. Each type has a basic fear and motivation that propels them toward common behaviors or interests. These types are the story of who you thought you had to be in order to survive. These types, when were living in them fully, are a limitation of our potential. They tell us that in order to be loved, we must do certain things or be certain things, ultimately limiting our access to choices that may be better for our overall well-being.

With that in mind, the goal when working with the Enneagram is to release the belief that you must be this one thing and allow for space to be a full expression of who you are. Live not as your Enneagram type, but work toward expanding your definition of self as you come to terms with who you thought you had to be.