In case you’re new here, I’ve found a lot of self awareness in the last five years or so by identifying myself as a 9 on the Enneagram.

(If you’ve never taken an Enneagram test, you can find a condensed one here.)

Your core struggle will be different if you are not a 9, or possibly a 2. The disclaimer here is this is mine, Standing for Something, and the purpose of this post is really to work through my own existential dread on this fresh February 1 of a “new” election year—also known as The Same Election We Did Last Time.

The 9 is a peacemaker, bless our hearts. Our most basic desire is harmony in our environment, and the first thing we sacrifice in order achieve that is our own beliefs and opinions.

Our childhood wound is rejection of our voice, which loosely means the first time we realized our needs were an issue we figured out how to shut them down.

As an affect of this, we’re pretty easy to be around. We match well with stronger personalities, because we don’t really know what we want to eat or who we want to hang out with on Friday night. We haven’t known that for a very long time and we picked you because you appear to enjoy making those hard calls.

As I navigate these midlife decades, however, the common effort has been in building back this lack of boundaries which worked famously for me in “less crowded” years. As it turns out, my inner peace is a pretty important factor in properly performing the jobs I inherited by having children and reaching for a career in creativity.

With that said, I’ve written a lot about the psychological warfare of the past two election cycles (read: I fucking hate election years).

I find myself wondering if I’m the only one flashing back to my divorcing parents, screaming at each other through the lens of a five year old, perfectly framed by the spindles of our staircase and feeling like I’ll never be able to shrink myself small enough to make it stop.

…and that’s just it.

I won’t.

I can’t get small enough to make people be nice to each other at age 5, nor could I do so at 25.

Not at 33, 37…and I feel myself preparing in February this time for it not to work out at 41 either.

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What’s interesting about 9’s is we also belong to this thing called an “anger triad.” Anger is an emotion we’re repressing most of the time, because ignoring yourself for a living is actually pretty enraging. So I find myself in these flashpoints from time to time, throwing caution to the wind to reveal what I really think. Colorful language is my favorite way to go about this.

It feels so good, you guys, up to and until this “moment of weakness” converts to a launching pad for the shame spiral. When I get to visit regret during peacetime, upon discovering someone was offended by what I said while I was temporarily out of fucks.

This is the moment when five-year-old Michelle comes back to ask me what I was thinking by asserting myself, heaven forbid, and making us both the source of a disruptive conflict.

This is my cycle, and I wonder if it’s the thing I’m *actually* dreading for a 2024 where we perform The Same Election We Did Last Time: That I’ll slip up and say what I really think in front of someone who is potentially triggered by it. That I’ll have to confront that in 2025, when everyone is getting along again, and wish I could just have the discipline to shut the hell up sometimes.

Here’s the thing about standing for something though, I am learning: People learn how to act around you when you do it confidently.

Just because your brain *thinks* you should feel guilty about that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. You can tell it that you deserve to take up this space—hold this belief—and it can learn to believe you.

Your life can start to look like people loving you for your opinion, or leaving you to be someone else’s friend with it. To be sure, both things are better than the alternative.

When I look really objectively in hindsight, I realize I’ve steadily become less anxious by accepting myself for who I am and just letting her live. I want myself to keep that in mind this year…

By letting people distance themselves from me instead of accommodating their ranting about stuff that makes me uncomfortable;

By letting them unfriend and unfollow, or by unfriending or unfollowing them myself;

By not forcing myself to consider their crazy at the expense of my own sanity;

I get to stop upsetting myself in order to be liked. I get to do my life, all of it, in alignment.

In peace. 

Standing for something is the mountaintop, actually. Get there, people pleasers.