What's Your Venn Diagram?
This week, I go to therapy so maybe, you don’t have to!?!
Whenever I’ve done personality tests, and I’ve done a lot, I always come out smack in the middle somewhere. I’ve tried to test the enneagram so many times, and easily get typed as at least 4 different numbers. My Myers Briggs has a few steady themes, but the nuance changes over time. I vacillate between Thinking and Feeling, though I am usually a bit more extrovert than introvert, a little more Judging than Perceiving.So I get why people can have a hard time figuring me out, depending on which traits I’m expressing in the moment. In therapy last week, I was talking about the contrast between Fierce Me and Kind Me. Indeed, those two can come across as cold me and codependent me, when I am being childish or in a rush. Though ferocity and kindness can feel quite different, they can both arise from genuine me.Eventually, my therapist called me out and suggested I stop ‘pathologizing’ my personality and behavior. Oops! I do tend to assume there are things wrong with me that need fixing, even though I carry them in the basket called consciousness and the path to self-realization. It can be a fine line, right? Wanting to express oneself as authentically as possible without also having to see elements of ‘past me’ as bad or confused when compared to the clearer and cleaner me in the present.
This conversation gave me the idea of creating a Venn diagram. Instead of seeing things as polar opposites as well as pathologies, what if I embraced both aspects of my personality and behavioral preferences? Why, yes, of course, that is an enlightened approach and I took it. And who’s to say one can’t be fiercely kind or kindly fierce?Which opens the door for you to do the same. It’s a new way of approaching the destructive aspects of binary thinking — which regular readers know is one of my pet peeves. “Life is a spectrum!” I so often write. Now, I understand more clearly how to float and dance along the entire spectrum between two seeming opposites, without sacrificing my character. In fact, it’s allowing me to embrace the wholeness of my character and the flexibility to respond to each situation to which I am called.Stop pathologizing, aka putting ourselves down.Start embracing our apparent opposites, so we can employ all these traits consciously and a bit more self-aware.After I custom made my own one at the top of this article, I searched online for a feww tool. There are several! Here’s one you can play around with.
A quick note on the logo
It’s here! The choice was clear; the votes were few. I’ve heard from a few readers who’ve wanted to comment and gave up due to having make an account, etc. I hear you. The internet is not this happy go lucky place anymore, so we are stuck with the hoops. Please know that if you read in email, you can click reply like any other email and share your thoughts and feelings with me. I DO love hearing from you as writing into the silent void is a bit strange some days.
Oh! And one more thing. I have several “Little Darlings” — black and white drawing on sale right now. One of them is called Opposites Attract! You can see them here, custom-printed and custom-framed, ready to add whimsy to your wall.
