The wisdom of the Enneagram and web design for dummies

Here's what my e mail had to say today:

Try this Affirmation today: "I now affirm that I open myself up to people and the world." (Enneagram Transformations, 64)

That's an EnneaThought for the day from the Enneagram Institute. I receive these reminders daily, and I've been meaning to journal privately about them and failing. This one is especially well-suited to public blogging, and my reason for writing, so here goes.

The Enneagram Institute probably sounds a bit strange if you're unfamiliar with it, but it's focused on personality types and personal growth rather than anything creepy or culty. I read The Wisdom of the Enneagram a few months ago, and found it very compelling. The Enneagram is a personality typing system similar to the Meyers-Briggs system: you take a test that provides you with a label and description for your type. The description is eerily accurate, and you feel simultaneously less alone in the world and somewhat surprised that you may not be the unique snowflake your first-grade teacher said you were. That latter part is especially true for my type, which is number four, or the individualist. The long and short of a four is the need to express oneself to the world with an attendant fear of doing so--the drive to be unique and creative with a lack of motivation and a sense of isolation. We convince ourselves that we're too different from the world to be understood, so we hide ourselves away, but we want people to come in and drag us out and be our friends. It sounds a little selfish and exhausting, and it is. 

This blog is one of my attempts to "open myself up to people and the world." The challenges are actually showing it to people and convincing them to read it, as well as avoiding over-sharing because of the false sense of security provided by a blanket of text on a screen. I'm integrating my blog into a personal website built for a class that I fondly refer to as web design for dummies, and I hope to keep working on it and using it after the class ends. To make things a bit more odd, I am amalgamating this fairly personal blog with my resume and portfolio. A recent Forbes article pointed out that having a professional personal website is increasingly important to the quest to build a career. Such sites may well be the resume of the future. Conglomerating personal ramblings and innermost thoughts with one's resume may not be the best route to professionalism, so I will have to consider this moving forward. For now, though, I think it's sort of an interesting endeavor to combine these private and public personas. If you ask Mark Zuckerberg, people of integrity don't need separate public and private personalities. While I am with most of the general public on feeling reluctant to share all of my life's data with the entire web, I also find that idea intriguing, perhaps as a result of my fourness. How would relationships at work change if everyone really knew each other's innermost hopes, fears, and neuroses along with their work ethics and the names of their children and pets?