Sometimes I Wish I Had Bigger Feelings
Instead, I have a narrow range of mostly quiet emotions
I sometimes tell people I don’t have feelings. That’s an exaggeration, of course. What I really mean is that I don’t have big feelings.
Yesterday, my lifelong dream came true — I signed a contract with a publisher. My first book will be published later this year. Some people would have jumped up and down. They would have been giddy. Sloppy feelings of joy would have sloshed down their shirt and gotten all over anyone who got too close.
I’m happy — of course I am. See the little smile that flashes from time to time? Mostly, though, what I feel is calm.
I’m not broken. There’s nothing wrong with me that causes me to feel things in such a quiet, small way. I’m a typical enneagram type 5. That means I tend to respond to the world through logic rather than emotions. When I do experience an emotion, I basically let myself feel it for awhile, then let it go. I hold it up and say, “Oh, isn’t this interesting. This is happiness.” Then I fold it up like a shirt and slip it in a drawer. The emotion I feel most intensely is anger.
The enneagram is my favorite personality-typing system. It’s an old system, rooted more in religion than psychology, but I find it to be more user-friendly than the Myers-Briggs or the Big Five. It’s also eerily accurate. If I know a person’s enneagram type, it helps me understand them in a way that leads to compassion and empathy.
Any enneagram type can be a writer, but the type most likely to write — especially fiction and poetry — is the 4, the individualist. I read a lot of stories on this platform about people struggling with emotions, people who feel lost or hopeless, people who struggle. People who are most likely 4’s. Reading about their struggles makes me glad I don’t feel my feelings with that level of intensity. There is definitely a benefit to being head-centered rather than heart-centered.
But it would have been nice to feel ecstatic over my life-long dream coming true. I could have jumped up and down like a game show contestant. Okay, I probably would have hurt myself if I had done that, but still. It wasn’t even an option. Even if I were a game show contestant, I wouldn’t behave like a game show contestant — unless I were a contestant on Jeopardy! Then I would behave exactly like the typical Jeopardy! winner — they celebrate their wins with a handshake and a smile.
