I love filling out forms.
I adore checking boxes, writing my name and birthday, or circling “all that apply.”
My enjoyment of forms is a well-known fact among my family and friends, yet I often wonder why I look forward to defining myself within paper pages or computer screens.
From clipboards and sanitized doctor’s office pens to especially the Enneagram and Meyers-Briggs test, forms have captivated my attention and type-A personality since I was young enough to write my name in forcibly neat letters.
Perhaps I love the sense of control that filling out a form gives me; I can redefine myself within the range of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” and rewrite myself to the extremes and standards I wish I so truly embodied.
As I took a career survey today, quickly choosing my sequence of bubbles to select and feeding my personality into a grid of responses, I wondered what a stranger would think of me. Would they misjudge me to be a selfish and calculating person? Probably, based on my extremist answers, I painted myself in such harsh framing.
I’m a perfectionist: strongly agree.
I like to be in control: strongly agree.
I consider myself an artistic and empathetic person: disagree.
Yes, I like to be in control of my path and obsess over small details. But I also procrastinate and struggle to finish my homework, regardless of if it’s turned in the next day. I don’t find myself to be empathetic, but I care so deeply for those close to me.
The simple definition of my personality in the agree and disagree circles wasn’t as simple as I would have liked to believe.
It’s easier to be defined into a form than it is to recognize the faults and successes and the complicated nature of even the traits that I find intrinsic to myself. It’s easier for the algorithm to tell me what category I belong to rather than let myself acknowledge that I’m nowhere close to a “one-size-fits-most” grouping, just like no one is. My personality is very dependent on those around me and the conditions of my life.
My love of forms was just a microcosm of my much larger need to define myself in a way that others can understand and to simplify my personality into a list of characteristics and strengths and weaknesses. I am an “Enneagram 3,” an ENTJ, a Ravenclaw, a perfectionist, and an overthinker.
Perhaps they provide me with a community; it is true that I feel connected to those who share a similar personality as me.
Yet I am so much more than the groupings and listings that demonstrate my analytical personality, just like the other people placed within the carefully circumscribing boundaries of categories.
I place my insecurities and worries and ambitions into crafting the person I want to become in each form I fill out, inscribing myself into the all-encompassing extremes of my personality contained by that five-circle range.
This leads me to think that we are all so much more than the categories we’re placed in, whether or not we create them ourselves.
