It's a quarter after midnight, and I'm still up, still thinking. I'm still feeling flabbergasted and a little overwhelmed by all the strong opinions and feelings that the twists and turns of the Plain Layne saga have unleashed, both in myself and in others. If it is the mark of a good artist to have moved his audience, then the author behind Plain Layne has certainly accomplished his goal.
The thing I'm still thinking about is how much I had connected with the Layne character (when I, like many others, still believed she was for real), how I could identify with many of the problems she was facing: compulsive people-pleasing, lack of clear boundaries, lack of self-care, lack of self-love. The desire to "help", the hidden pride, and the craving for response, attention, affection, love.
The movie Jeremy, his coworker Dave, and I went to see tonight was The Terminal, with Tom Hanks. (by the way, a very funny movie, with some scenes bordering on slapstick comedy...go see it)
In the movie, Cathereine Zeta-Jones plays a character very much like "Layne", very much like me. Certainly very much like the me I was, and still (uncomfortably) much like the me I can still be at times.
I received an unexpected gift recently: an opportunity to step outside myself, and observe how I come across to other people. One evening, as a mix of friends and friends-of-friends were gathered, I gradually began to realize that another person in the room was the same personality type as me. An Enneagram Two.
But not just similar. EXACTLY the same. A Social-Variant Two with a Three Wing (Riso/Hudson's "The Host/Hostess"; "Everybody's Friend"). I had never (to my knowledge) met anybody so exactly like me before, with one crucial difference: less self-aware, in full-blown denial of any hidden fears and desires, and (in this particular instance) self-medicating the pain with alcohol.
(Note: this was a friend-of-a-friend, someone I had met briefly only once before. A quick check with our friend in common, who has studied the Enneagram longer than I have, confirmed my assessment, right down to the instinctual variant.)
It was an unsettling and dis-illusioning experience, watching someone who is essentially a less healthy mirror image of you, feeling a sense of unease and distaste for what you see in that mirror. Getting a sense of the dissonance between how you see yourself, and how the world sees you.
As I said, an unexpected, painful, but instructive, gift.
I had never really understood before that night what my best friend (and ex-boyfriend) John had told me: that I bowled people over, scared people off, made people suspicious, with my enthusiasm and my "personality". With my desire to entertain, to win people over, to "work the room", to make them like me. Make them love me (the deepest fear of the Enneagram Two is to be unloved).
The irony, of course, is that by trying ever-harder to win people over and make them love you, you're creating the opposite of what you most desire (this kind of paradox is true of all the nine Enneagram personality types, each in a different arena). I never fully appreciated that fact until I looked into my mirror, and saw what effect this person had.... on me. I became silent, backed down, shut off. Ceded space to the Personality.
Sifting carefully through my thoughts and feelings about my words and actions this week, I could now detect the faint echoes of that paradox, the ripple effects. I'm feeling both grateful and ashamed: grateful that I can now see things I couldn't (or wouldn't) see before, and ashamed that my motives were perhaps less pure than I had confidently assumed. Painful. Humbling. But necessary in order to grow.
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