🍵 newisms

Date: Tuesday, June 3, 2025

Style Generation

Style, Generation.

I often roll my eyes at texts that start with one small bit of a larger dictionary definition. It's a way of bringing up a subject that suggests that you are about to examine it, but it seemingly just became a Thing People Do at some point. But that eye-roll is an instinctive one, nurtured by years reading schlock that lived in my public library. Sometimes the intent of starting a passage in that way was inscrutable, not through intent really but through thoughtlessness.

I think it's interesting that some intrepid Gen X YA authors whose names escape my memory defined so much of my yearnings and my values while also giving me a mental repertoire of cliches that beg to be scoffed at. Thing which could have once been clever is done and used carelessly, therefore thing must be avoided. While showing me what I don't want to be in many ways, corny GenXer YA novels also gave me a lens through which to examine myself in relation to the world around me.

It was a little bit of early-onset irony poisoning, but moreso than that it was a desire to be self-reliant in some kind of way that eschews the influence of authority on my life. It was a desire to deconstruct enforced meanings. It was a desire to reinvent myself. In retrospect, it's easy to consider these instincts adolescent, but they're still the instincts I have, and to say otherwise is to be in denial.I can recognize logically that I cannot be solely self-reliant, that authority has its violent influence even if I abstain from societal norms, that I must understand things first in order to deconstruct them effectively. And yet, my knee jerks to: run away from the people who make you be who you don't want to be, defy the people who chase after you, and scoff from the outside at what they do at their place inside the circle of self-satisfaction.

While looking around online for some validation or contradiction to this claim that these viewpoints wer inherited from Gen X perspectives, I found a smattering of websites of dubious quality listing the values of Gen X. One of my favorite ideas gleaned from this process, in that it makes me laugh when I see it, is this: Generation X is uniquely shaped by growing up amidst economic uncertainty and technological development. You don't say? What generation has cleanly avoided economic uncertainty and technological development? I'm all ears.

Anyhow, all this is to say, I resist the urge to start my text with a short dictionary definition by contrarily placing it after the introductory paragraphs, and by making it a long one instead.

    style1 /staÉŞl/ noun
  1. way of doing something [countable, uncountable] a particular way of doing, designing, or producing something, especially one that is typical of a particular place, period of time, or group of people somebody’s way of behaving [countable] the particular way that someone behaves, works, or deals with other people
  2. somebody’s way of behaving [countable] the particular way that someone behaves, works, or deals with other people
  3. art/literature/music [countable, uncountable] a typical way of writing, painting etc that is used by a particular person or during a particular period of time
  4. fashion/design
    a) [countable] a particular design or fashion for something such as clothes, hair, furniture etc SYN fashion Car styles have changed radically in the past 20 years.traditional/modern style The rooms are furnished in a modern style.
    b) [uncountable] the quality of being fashionable
  5. attractive quality [uncountable] a confident and attractive quality that makes people admire you, and that is shown in your appearance, or the way you do things → stylish
  6. correct writing/ [uncountable] a way of using words or spelling that is considered correct
  7. → in style, cramp somebody’s style, lifestyle

-- Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online

Myself in the Style of My Neighbor

I swear I don't BELIEVE in personality assessments, I just find them to be useful frameworks for comparing one theoretical mind to another

I didn't intend this blog to be largely about myself, but I write what catches my interest, and I suppose I am interested in myself the past few days. I guess that's why anybody STARTS a blog. I assume people keep writing because additional topics catch their interest, but to write longform for an audience of the whole world must have some baseline level of self-importance involved. The self-interest is a sort of phase that I go in and out of, and I suppose it's normal. And I guess today I'm going to attempt to talk somewhat neutrally about the way that I style myself.

I'll start with personality types to get it out of the way. I don't believe any personality assessment is the definitive reality of anything for anyone anywhere. However, I find the Enneagram of Personality to be a useful method of considering personality, especially when it comes to examining how a person changes in response to the world around them.

I am an enneagram type six, if you believe in enneagrams. If you don't, you don't have to look it up really. The important thing here is that Type Sixes are known for internalizing outside voices to help manage their anxiety and lack of confidence in their own perspective. People often call it the "internal council." This is to make up for the fact that individually consulting literally everybody we know about every decision isn't a functional way to live our lives.

I guess part of why that isn't functional is that the questions keep going. If I ask someone for their opinion, I'll keep asking questions and testing their opinion's virtues and limitations (this runs into another personality type I identify with-- The Devil's Advocate a la MBTI). People take this as an insult to their way of thinking, but I just want to understand their logic and really know what they mean by their suggestions and why those are the suggestions they offer. How much of their advice is based on reality for everybody, and how much of it is just personal preference on their part? Is the outcome they want really the outcome I would want? Are they taking the gravity of my problem seriously, or is this a flippant answer? What variables are they failing to take into an account? The questions I ask are not to undermine their perspective, but to express the seriousness with which I treat that perspective. If I think your perspective is worth internalizing, I will want to examine it.

And so, my personality has been determined by an internal panel of judges as well. It used to be just reflections on the values of people I knew and trusted that guided my efforts to reinvent myself as a better self, but as I tried those various selves on for size, I created a repertoire of personal tools for handling life. They aren't really personas, but instead the they are the new members of my internal council. Not a parent, but the version of me who has attempted to live by their words and seen the consequences of that. Not my friends, but the version of me who attempted to be a good friend to those friends and who recalls the struggles and successes and holds the words of those friends close. Not my teachers, but the version of me who tried as hard as possible to be the ideal student in each class. There is also a voice I do not trust that shows up to council meetings-- the voice of the public. I call this "the internet in my head", but it's really the general challenger in my mind that presents me with every dipshit counterexample to everything I think. With the power of the public commentary in my mind, I have gone the past decade learning to not need to air my dirty laundry out on social media in order to get the full confidence-demolishing experience of being harrassed persistently by contradictory opinions.

Enneagram types also have a variety of relationships to other types, which is another Enneagram tool I use to help myself understand the inconsistent opinions and demands of these internal voices. I identify each of the main council members with the various aspects to my type. A 5 wing, a 7 wing, the 3 direction, the 9 direction in a couple ways, and the pure 6. While I identify these voices with these different motives within myself, I still recognize very clearly the external people in my life who I was listening to when I threw myself into trying to become that self fully in an adolescent effort to live my life completely according to the perspective I trusted the most at the time.

What is the Enneagram of Personality and Why do I bring it up?

The Enneagram of Personality is a personality typology that defines 9 main personality types. Discussion about the Enneagram attempts to create a variety of detail levels, to account for the fact that peoples' personalities become more honed they reach adulthood, and then more complicated as they age. I suppose some consider it a science (largely people who sell books on it), and some consider it a pseudoscience (largely people who can't understand why an idea that isn't objectively true could ever be useful to discuss). I mostly consider it a dialogue. Discussion of the Enneagram has provided some with a framework for studying interpersonal relationships, and that study has provided me with a useful catalog of personality concepts to discuss.

    Enneagram Concepts I Find Useful
  • Centers of Intelligence: People aren't born with a specific personality, but they may be born with or gravitate towards making prioritizing instincts, feelings, or thoughts in their decisionmaking. These are the three centers of intelligence in Enneagram. The person who taught about enneagrams at the conference I went to cautioned against categorizing those who have not reached adulthood more specifically than that.
  • Core Motivations: The 9 types are defined by their core motivations. People recieve a core lesson from childhood that sticks in their craw, leading them to gravitate toward a main motivation that drives them, but sometimes it is also a motivation that they reject or deny in some way. It's often said that you know what Enneagram type you are by recognizing which one you feel most embarrassed by. The most important part of motivations to me is that they are all equally valid possible motivations to have. I believe there's more than 9 core motivations a person can have, but this system gives me the brain space to consider more motivations than I would without it.
  • Wings: Young adults with a particular type will find themselves running into problems with the way they interact with the world, and they will drift this way or that way in order to adapt. This will push them into acting more like a neighboring type. For example, a two acting like a three would be a two with a three wing, or 2w3. Some people keep the same wing their whole life, but most people will change back and forth as they course-correct and make their way through life.
  • Connecting Lines/Growth Directions: Each type has a relationship to two types sort of "across the chart" from themselves. One of them is a "stress and disintregration" direction-- this is who you become under stress, as a coping mechanism. One of them is a "security and integration" direction-- this is who you become when you are less stressed than usual, or so they say. Maturity is apparently supposed to be learning to recognize when you're stressed and moving towards security.
The Enneagram of Personality, Human Diversity, and The Golden Rule

I think this is mostly because, unlike personality assessment systems that are based on an external judgement of what must lie within various groups of people, enneagram (ideally) starts with, "what motivates a person?" From there, all the outward manifestations in behavior are thought to arise from peoples' internal motivations interacting with the world, and their methods of pursuing those motivations adjusting over the course of a lifetime. Obviously, there is nothing about this method that makes it an infallible system of human categorization. I don't believe that there are only 9 core types of people, but I do believe that there are AT LEAST 9 types of people, and they are different in a way which runs deeper than how they act as an individual or work within a group. 9 types is just a manageable number of possibilities to keep in mind. Not so many that I can't remember the details of each, but enough to humble myself into realizing I don't know what's going on in someone's head. To me, the study of the Enneagram is a body of work that explores the idea that people really are different inside, and even common motivations are not universal, which is why it is kind of stupid to assume you can tell why someone does anything at a glance just by thinking about why you personally might have done it.

Also, the Enneagram is a reminder that the golden rule is stupid. If I treat others how I think I ought to be treated, I am not a kind person. I wasn't a kind person, back when I really endeavored to follow the golden rule. I want to be held to high standards, so I held others to high standards, quite rudely, seeing my behavior as a sign of respect towards the depths of their human potential and the unique spark within them. People did not like that. I have to understand that others want to be treated in a way that is fundamentally different from what I think the right treatment for me is. This, too, is a way to respect the depths of human potential and the unique spark within people, but it is one that acknowledges diversity of internality.

My favorite part of the enneagram, then is that can use it to demand myself to recognize that there are AT LEAST 9 valid core motivations a person might guide their life with, and being like "well that's stupid" won't make those people stop existing lol.

My problems with typical Enneagram discussion

The growth directions are where I butt up against the Christian origins of the Enneagram. I'm not sure if I agree with the charting of growth from stress to security. I think these two different directions are valid based on their circumstances, including the stress direction. It is okay to become who you need to be to rise to the occasion, as long as you recognize the unsustainability of remaining there forever. It is also okay to not remain the most zen version of yourself forever. I think the prioritizing of one direction as the "right" one and the other as the "wrong one" is profoundly Christian, as well as elaborating the motivations into vices and virtues. Core motivations are what they are, and so are coping mechanisms and R&R habits.

Of course, I know that people usually see some part of themselves as the self they want to be, and the other part of themselves as the self they want to be. I think my stress and security directions simply fail to correspond with disintegration and integration for me. I have a trauma disorder, so the self I am under extreme pressure just makes more sense to me compared to the self I am without that pressure.

I guess ultimately, the world makes more sense and I can make more decisive decisions when its clear that my fears are a real and present issue, and not some hypothetical thing that might eventually happen. I find myself more comfortable and driven and certain in times when I fear for my life than I am when I'm put into the kind of position where I'm expected to heal from the damages of my past and become a well-adjusted person. When I am in the low-stakes circumstance, I do not integrate. I just rely on others to know what to do during these times of relative peace. I take a back seat, and I wonder who I have become, since I felt so strong and certain when my anxieties and forethought allowed me to jump into action when the worst case scenario came to pass.

"But Alex," an Enneagram liker might say, "The healthy type 6 is self-affirming and the unhealthy type 6 relies on authority." Yes! That's the problem, isn't it? An enneagram type 6 is also given 9 as the direction to aspire to-- the "lay back and let others decide" type. And 3 is our direction to avoid-- the achiever. And I don't want to pick and choose which dichotomy is the real one. The truth is that perpetual self-affirmation is a sticky trap, and so is reliance on external authority. Laying back is a sticky trap, and so is always jumping into action.

I guess the problem is not just that I sometimes feel like I'm growing in my 3 and deteriorating in my 9. It's just that I feel like it doesn't make sense to synonymize these stress and growth directions with health and unhealth. There is a stress direction health to me-- When my fear becomes reality, all the preparation I've done in my paranoia becomes appropriate. There is a growth direction unhealth to me-- When my fear does not become reality, I am jumping at shadows, and I am languishing in indecision from my inability to process a pleasant reality. Like a seed might need ice or fire to germinate, or like a plant might smother and stunt itself in the overgrowth of its leaves and vines pulling upon one another, it is sometimes preferable for me to grow in stress than it is for me to luxuriate in bounteous peace. There is also a stress direction unhealth to me-- the version of my 3 who disregards the motivations of others, who (shaking and jittery) jumps into action from fear alone and cannot make a sound decision, thus realizing my fears. There is a growth direction health to me-- the version of my 9 who can recognize what is and isn't important to worry about, who reasonably trusts others to take the wheel, who believes in the possibility of cooperation. I don't believe there is one ideal to grow towards, and another to cast aside entirely. I believe in balance. So why does the enneagram pose that only my 9 is trustworthy, and my 3 is my devil?

I would guess that an aspect of that is just like... white people therapy logic. If you have time to be thinking about these things, you must be safe. Society treates you fairly, after all. Therefore, the problems stem from yourself. It's kind of like how CBT that has not been adjusted for the actual reality of the patient on the recieving end becomes gaslighting. I'm in an experimental therapy for lgbt poc right now, and it aims to avoid that gaslighting for adjusting the expectations for what the patient's reality actually entails. Sometimes it's just not safe to be in society, through no fault of your own. Sometimes the right thing to do in strife is not the ideal thing to do in peace. Sometimes your negative thoughts, behaviors, and experiences don't stem from mental illness, it stems from the horrible way people treat you for no fucking reason when you are in a marginalized group, or rather, they're marginalizing you for being in a group.

I get frustrated with white ppl christianity and white ppl therapy for posing that you are the problem if you are suffering, because if you would simply act right then you would not be suffering. In part because being marginalized is a reality, and the reality of a marginalized person is often the real barrier to suffering less. In part because it's not even true for white people, since that "positive thinking and trying hard will fix you" idea is also based on like meritocratic thinking and we live in a deeply unequal society that simply holds up success as a carrot on a stick over white poor peoples' heads and tells them they're almost there already because they're already born into being a class above the rest by being white, they just have to try a little harder and they'll be like the fucking buddha and jesus and the richest man on earth all in one.

But in the end, balance is real. Not cutting some part of myself off and calling it the devil and running away from it and towards the part I call god's voice, but instead recognizing that there are all these different parts of me that all want to have a say, and I have to learn to calm down my nervous system and take stock of the present reality in order to sort out what's really going on and to come to a compromise between those selves. Judgement will not help me, even if I pretend it's god judging me. Meditation might, though.

In this way, I see the "type neighbors" in my brain-- my wings and directions-- as reflections of various external neighbors in real life. When I act in strong accordance with one of those aspects of myself, it kind of feels like I've grown completely on the scaffolding of the people around me, like beans climbing corn stalks or something. Do I grow with the habit of a vine? I always wanted to be a tree that could stand alone, an oak in a field, but if I were brave enough to be a tree, I'd still have to be a tree in a forest, depending on the roots and rhizomes of other trees and of fungi. I want to be independent, but if there is a sort of man who can be an island, I am not that man.

Myself for an Audience of One

Who do you write to when no one is reading?
    style yourself something
  • formal to give yourself a particular title or name

-- Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online

Notice the oneself in the definition. That's important... You can only style yourself. You can't style someone else. It's about your self-image. No one else can control your self-image.

-- kentix, WordReference Forum

When I am talking about myself, I am not myself in the way that I intend to be. That's something that I keep running into here. I want to write this blog about something else, for someone else. Someone else is not here right now. It's just me here, and an audience of me.

When I was younger, I was taught at school that moral integrity is abiding by the same morals inside and out, whether you're around others or whether you're in isolation. I was taught at church that it is okay to PERFORM moral integrity superficially, regardless of whether I'm alone or not, or whether I really want to inside, because the audience of God is everywhere. Then, when I started disbelieving in my childhood religion, I was left with the moral of being honest with myself, not lying to myself, being straight-up with myself, because I wanted to uncover my TRUE morals. What do I believe at heart, when I abandon God?

I discovered morals within myself as criticism, self-contradictory criticism. Morals, which amassed within me from the aggregation of all cultural messages I recieved, were judgements. I could not say, "One is right when one does this," because I had no authority to decide that in my own eyes, but I could say, "People do not like it when one does this." And doing what people do not like was wrong, if doing what God does not like is gone. Of course, this is not the framework I stuck with. I tried a lot of value systems on for size, though I didn't realize I was doing that at first. Authoritarianism, legalism, social darwinism, materialism, free markets, populism, communism, romanticism, spiritualism, environmentalism, anarchism, etc. I think I kept a bit of everything I touched. This produced a great deal of confusion in theory, but moving from thing to thing, I began to recognize the relief of something underneath the patterns I layered over top of myself.

I think of it now as "ethics over moralism" as a system of values. Maybe it's humanism, but also not quite. Objective subjectivism, maybe. I think that every single situation ever is completely unique, and I think that the only people really appropriate to subjectively judge some extreme circumstances are those who are in that circumstance, because they are the only people with the full context. (I think maybe this is why stories exist. You have to put characters into contexts and situations and shit to feel some way or think some way or instinctively react some way to their decision at the climax, or whatever other nexus points where the many variables come together for a moment of tough decisionmaking.)

In any case, I now imagine that people know their own lives the best, and that they have more information about their circumstances than I do. What then of a cultist who lacks what I've gained in knowledge of deconstruction since I left church? Are they making the best possible decisions for themselves? Do I judge them by what they know or what I know? And more than that, by what they think or what I think?

I just try not to judge others, in the end, and that served me decently for the past decade. It does not suffice anymore, though, since people have ventured to trample on subjectivism with fascism. It's like, well, clearly that's wrong. And yet they do it anyway. So I must judge. Maybe there are types of action which demand judgement? But the human drive for justice leads to fascism in some ways...

Anyway. I feel myself coming back around to think about the idea of integrity. Whatever it is, in a world that doesn’t objectively run on the rigid values I was given as a child, I don’t think I have it really. When I’m by myself, I don’t play to an audience of myself. And it’s not just the internal council thing. It’s that I always have a tendency of completely tailoring myself to either the person in front of me, or to individual people i respect who remain on my mind even when they are not frequent in my life. It feels like a life hack, almost. I am troubled by my mind’s ability to completely shift perspective, opinion, memory. I suppose they don’t call it a dissociative disorder for nothing. It is distressing to watch myself change from within. To recognize how I am abandoning my own priorities and to have no sympathy for the self I derailed by changing in this way— who I will have to return to being. This is a great source of conflict for me.

It is some comfort now to know what my mental issues are, at least, and to know the number of selves I cycle through is limited. But I kind of have to pin myself down to communicate coherently, and to do that I must imagine specific people before me. People who make me like who I am when I’m with them. This has caused a small conflict today. I know what I feel like writing about, and I might be writing for just an audience of myself right now, but I don’t feel it’s appropriate to ONLY discuss myself here, not in front of “you”, the one person who, for some reason, I have been mentally speaking to here today.

The version of myself who I endeavor to be while writing this post is the version of me that I am for one specific friend. And I don’t intend on showing my blog to that friend. I must imagine them, though. To me, that friend is sort of the gold standard for judging the worth of writing. We have similar tastes, we seem to make similar judgements, and we laugh at similar things. The only difference is that they are markedly smarter than me. And pretension won’t suffice! I have to talk up, speak honestly with SOME form of integrity, and I have to be humble. My writing will never be high-quality to the degree that I’d like, but if I am honest and clear, and if I engage my brain, I can imagine this friend giving me the ultimate word of approval: “You cooked here.”

That hasn't been enough for me in my own mind, though. The tendency to rely on the internalized observer. Whether that's an internalized version of external judgement, or whether that's the selves I've ended up being having a dialogue about what has and hasn't worked, or whether that's me pinning myself down with one person's judgement, none of that has stopped me running in circles. At a certain point, it feels like the most important thing becomes just picking some vision of my future self and just saying, "This is it, this is the value system we're prioritizing, we can re-examine as we go but we just need to stop arguing and move forward."

I guess I need to stop styling myself as the ideal friend, the ideal kid, the ideal student. Who is my ideal self, to me? What can I pin down in my own vision? What do all of my internal selves have in common?

I'm gonna hazard a guess right now, and make myself list some shit I know I care about. It's not gonna be the final draft of anything in my life, but this comes to mind right now.

Epigenesis