Well, This Explains a Few Things

Apparently I have chased another rabbit.

This one did not begin with work, money, relationships, rebuilding my life, or trying to make sense of something that happened to me. It began with four letters, two numbers, a wing, and another pair of letters that looked suspiciously like somebody had spilled a Scrabble bag across the table:

ISFP 6w5 so/sp.

The more I have read about it, the more often I have caught myself thinking, Well, that explains a few things.

I should say right from the beginning that I do not consider personality typing some sort of diagnosis. MBTI and the Enneagram are frameworks. They are ways of describing recurring patterns in how people think, react, relate to others, and move through the world. Human beings are considerably more complicated than four letters and a couple of numbers.

But sometimes a framework gives you words for things you have known about yourself for years without ever quite knowing how to explain them.

That is what seems to be happening here.

Starting With ISFP

ISFP stands for Introverted, Sensing, Feeling, and Perceiving. Like most personality labels, those words can be misleading if taken too literally.

The first one certainly was for me.

Introverted does not mean that I want to be alone.

I actually do not.

I would much rather have people around me. I would rather have a group of people with whom I can talk, work, laugh, argue, share meals, sit around a fire, solve problems, and generally move through life together.

What I do not particularly want is people around me simply for the sake of having people around me.

There is a difference between company and belonging.

What appears particularly important in the ISFP personality is something called Introverted Feeling, or Fi. In plain English, that means there tends to be a fairly strong internal value system.

I will listen to other people. I will listen to experts. I will listen to authority. I will listen to traditions, policies, arguments, explanations, and advice.

But eventually something still has to pass an internal test.

Does this make sense to me?

Is this fair?

Is this consistent with what I believe?

Can I live with myself if I do this?

That does not necessarily mean believing that I am always right. It means that simply telling me something is correct is probably not enough. I have to reconcile it with what I have experienced and what I believe to be true.

That sounds familiar.

Something Happens, Then I Ask Why

Another part of the ISFP framework that makes sense to me is the relationship between sensing and intuition.

I have always considered myself philosophical. Anyone who has followed my writing for any length of time knows I can disappear down some fairly spectacular rabbit holes. Because of that, I once assumed I must belong somewhere among the strongly intuitive personality types.

But when I look at how those rabbit holes actually begin, the pattern is usually different.

Something happens.

Someone says something.

I notice something that does not quite fit.

I remember something else that happened months or years ago.

Two pieces suddenly seem connected.

Then I start asking what it means.

In MBTI language, that can be described as Extraverted Sensing feeding Introverted Intuition: Se into Ni.

The sensing side notices what is actually happening. The intuitive side starts looking underneath it for the pattern.

Experience first.

Meaning afterwards.

That may describe me considerably better than starting with a theory and then trying to fit the world into it.

Then We Add the Six

This is where the Enneagram enters the picture.

Type Six is usually associated with security, trust, loyalty, preparedness, and uncertainty.

Sometimes Six is described as fearful or dependent upon authority, but that version never particularly resonated with me.

This does:

Who and what can I trust?

Can I trust this person?

Can I trust this organization?

Does what someone is doing match what they said?

If something falls apart, who will actually show up?

Are the rules really the rules, or do they change when convenient?

Am I missing something?

Those questions I recognize very well.

Trust matters to me.

And perhaps because trust matters, betrayal matters just as much.

If I believe someone, a workplace, a relationship, or a community operates according to a certain understanding, discovering that the understanding was not mutual is not simply disappointing.

It destabilizes the entire foundation.

Then I start checking the foundation.

The 5 Wing: Fine, I’ll Figure It Out Myself

The 6w5 combination adds some of the characteristics associated with Enneagram Five: curiosity, observation, privacy, skepticism, and a desire to understand systems.

This might explain one of my more obvious habits.

When something does not make sense, I research it.

Someone makes a claim?

I check it.

Two stories disagree?

I start looking for records.

Someone says something happened months ago?

I want to know what was actually said at the time.

Someone says there is a rule?

Show me the rule.

Something feels wrong?

Find out why.

This can lead to some fairly impressive rabbit holes.

I can begin with one simple question and eventually discover that I am reading years-old emails, meeting records, policy documents, old websites, archived material, or something else that I had absolutely no intention of looking at when I started.

The Six seems to want reassurance that the ground is solid.

The Five wants enough information to understand why.

Put them together and uncertainty becomes a research project.

Then Came the Part That Really Made It Fit

The final part is so/sp.

In Enneagram terminology, this refers to instinctual priorities. The three commonly discussed instincts are Social, Self-Preservation, and One-to-One.

In so/sp, Social comes first and Self-Preservation comes second.

Again, Social does not mean extroverted.

It is much more about belonging.

Where do I fit?

Who are my people?

What makes us a group instead of merely people occupying the same space?

What responsibilities do we have toward one another?

What does loyalty mean?

Who contributes?

Who remembers where we came from?

What happens to something we value after the original people are gone?

Those questions appear throughout my writing whether I am talking about work, relationships, community, history, or religion.

I Do Not Want to Be Alone

This was an important realization because some descriptions of introverts make it sound as though our ultimate dream is to build a cabin twenty kilometres from the nearest human being and spend the rest of our lives avoiding eye contact.

No.

I want people.

I want my people.

I want conversations that matter. I want shared experiences. I want people sitting around a table or a fire long after everyone should have gone to bed. I want people who can disagree without turning disagreement into warfare. I want people who show up when something needs doing.

I want community.

What I apparently cannot do very well is pretend something is community merely because everyone involved uses that word.

There has to be something underneath it.

Trust.

Reciprocity.

Shared responsibility.

Some recognition that what one person does affects other people.

Belonging matters enormously to me.

But I cannot manufacture trust simply because I want to belong.

Self-Preservation Asks Who Is Taking Out the Garbage

Then the sp part comes along and makes everything annoyingly practical.

Community sounds wonderful.

Who is doing the work?

Who is paying the bills?

Who is maintaining the property?

Who is fixing things?

Who is making sure there is food?

Who cleans up afterwards?

Who makes sure that whatever everyone claims to value will still be there five years from now?

That is where an ideal becomes a system capable of surviving.

I think this may explain why I become so frustrated when people love the idea of something but continually leave the work of sustaining it to somebody else.

If something matters, maintaining it matters.

Showing up is part of caring.

There Are Strengths Here

If this personality combination genuinely describes me, some strengths come with it.

I am loyal once trust has been established. I notice inconsistencies. I remember details. I am curious. I tend to form my own conclusions instead of simply adopting somebody else’s. I care about whether systems actually work. I value community. I remember history.

That last one seems increasingly important.

I remember people.

I remember stories.

I remember how things used to work.

I remember why something mattered before everyone became accustomed to it being there.

Maybe that is personality. Maybe it is age. Maybe it is simply what happens when you have lived long enough to watch things change.

Probably all three.

And There Is a Shadow Side

The exact same traits can become problems.

Observation can become hypervigilance.

Research can become obsession.

Intuition can become assumption.

A desire to understand can become a refusal to let something go.

If I notice something strange, investigate it, discover another oddity, and then another, eventually a pattern begins to emerge.

The pattern might be real.

It also might not be.

That means there is a question I probably need to ask myself more often:

What evidence would prove me wrong?

Not merely, What else supports what I already suspect?

That distinction matters.

Sometimes chasing the rabbit uncovers something important.

Sometimes the rabbit needs to lead me directly into evidence that destroys my original theory.

That is still useful.

Loyalty Has Its Problems Too

The other danger is remaining loyal for too long.

If something mattered once, I can spend an enormous amount of time trying to restore what it was.

A relationship.

A workplace.

A friendship.

A community.

A project.

I remember what it was supposed to be, and sometimes that memory makes it harder to admit that what exists now is something very different.

So I keep fixing.

Explaining.

Researching.

Trying again.

Until eventually something reaches its limit.

Then the person who appeared endlessly patient suddenly says:

Enough.

I recognize that too.

So Is This Me?

I think it might be.

I am not going to pretend a personality system has solved the great mystery of who I am.

But I recognize the landmarks.

A strong internal value system.

Experience before theory.

A tendency to look underneath events for patterns.

Deep loyalty combined with caution around trust.

Research as a response to uncertainty.

A strong desire for genuine community.

A need for that community to actually function.

A habit of remembering where things came from.

And an almost ridiculous inability to leave a rabbit alone when it runs past me.

Perhaps the simplest description of ISFP 6w5 so/sp that fits me is this:

I want to live authentically among people I can trust, contribute to something worth preserving, and understand enough about the world around me that neither I nor the people I care about are easily blindsided.

Yeah.

I can see myself in that.

Now where did that rabbit go?