I first learned about the Enneagram because one of my dearest friends was studying to become a nun. Qira invited me to a workshop run by a Jesuit priest, and we immediately fell down the proverbial rabbit hole, driving directly to the bookstore after the workshop and buying the only books they had: Understanding the Enneagram, by Don Riso and Russ Hudson, and Personality Types, by the same authors.

We both mistyped ourselves initially (I as a type 6; fae as a type 4), and we raved about the Enneagram to anyone who would sit still long enough to listen. Over the next eight years, I read everything I could find (which wasn’t much), we married (I joke that I get more than a toaster for springing faer from the convent), and I correctly typed myself as a 9.

In 2008, a social worker friend of mine saw a flyer for a weekend Enneagram workshop that was not only a short drive away, but was co-taught by one of the authors of the books I’d been devouring. It’s not a stretch to say that weekend changed my life.

Because of that workshop, I signed up for a depth work/4th way group taught by Russ Hudson and Jessica Dibb. We met for three days twice a year, and we used integrative breathing and experiential exercises to transform information into knowledge.

Five years later, Qira and I moved across the country. I kept studying the Enneagram, reading and practicing and wishing I could attend in-person trainings, but the ones I wanted to attend were many thousands of miles, many thousands of dollars, and many bushels of energy away from what was possible for me.

And then came the pandemic, and in-person trainings became online trainings. I have chronic illness of various flavors, and online trainings gave me the opportunity to show up to do deep work without physically wrecking myself.

It can be hard to see the fruits of self development while they’re emerging, but I can look back on the person I was in 2008 — angry, frustrated, stuck, overwhelmed, directionless — and see how different my life is these days.

It’s not that things are never hard. 2021 will go down in our personal histories as a truly terrible year, for example. But everything about my life and our lives together is so much better than it was then.

As a type 9, I’m prone to finding new and creative ways to keep myself from being affected by the world. I have issues with anger, with abandoning my own needs and wants in favor of not rocking the boat, with preferring the pretty story to messy reality.

There’s no end on the self-development path, and I’ll be uncovering and working with my stuff until the end. But today my marriage is deeply peaceful, and the issues that come up (however stormy they feel in the moment), are resolved quickly and with love. Doing the work meant that when we transitioned into polyamory, we had very little conflict around it.

Doing the work has meant that we’ve both learned to be more skillful with our own and each other’s physical and mental health issues and neurodivergences.

I can’t begin to express my gratitude and deep, existential relief that I found the Enneagram and my teachers. My life would look very different — and probably a lot more conventional than it does today.

And wouldn’t that be a crying shame?