Individualist

Individualist, Creative
Corresponds to Enneagram Style 4, Self-Preservation Subtype

A Dozen Things about You

1. You love taking reckless risks, which make you feel fully alive, authentic and extraordinary

2. To be ordinary feels like death to you. You must be “somebody” by finding meaning in what you do, and everything you do is an attempt to be anything but dull.

3. With your big feelings, your need for drama, you spin ordinary events into something astonishing—you want your life to look like the evening news

4. You believe, at the heart of it all, that you were born defective

5. You can be extremely aggressive in proving to the world that your “defectiveness” entitles you to getting what you deserve—which is an exceptional life

6. You are drawn to the bizarre, even death

7. You tend to be depressed, and you use your depression is a way of anticipating death. You feel that if you rehearse death through feeling dead, you’ll be able to handle it when it actually happens

8. If you’re “stuck” in a small town, a boring job or relationship, you feel you might as well be dead

9. On the high side, because you are totally comfortable with emotional intensity, when a crisis does hit, you’re able to respond in a way that someone with a different personality might not be able to—In a crisis, you have the wherewithal to be a true hero

10. Of all personality types, you feel the widest and deepest range of emotions. That means, when the situation calls for it, you can access depth that nobody dreamed was in you

11. If you are an artist, you can live with the barest survival necessities while you devote yourself to your art, and the harder you struggle, the greater your art

12. People of all personality types are creative in their own way, but yours is the classic artistic temperament, the starving artist who is locked in a life-and-death battle that is being fought mostly in your imagination.