I stood in the back row of the church balcony, leaning into the harmonies of a song I was somewhat familiar with, but not so familiar that I wasn’t making the occasional mistake. In the row in front of me stood a couple I’ve been friends with for almost twenty years. In the row in front of them stood one of my dearest lifelong friends and her family.

And the familiar internal litany started.

I wonder if they’re enjoying my singing. Is it distracting if I sing the harmony? Oof, that was a wrong note. I haven’t done much singing lately, and it’s obvious. Maybe I should sing quieter. Oh, I don’t really know this next song—I’ll wait until at least the second verse before I start singing so I can learn it well enough not to embarrass myself. Okay, now we’re talking. Oo, that was a tough transition, and I got the note right—will anyone appreciate the harmonies back here? Will they say anything? I hope they don’t make a big deal of it if they do, but it would be nice to know they noticed.

I feel so out of place here. Will everyone who knows me be judging me for how long it’s been since I came? Will any of the new people from the last few years ask me if this is my first time here? Will anyone even notice? If I came more often, I wouldn’t need to worry about people acting weird about me being here. But then I’d have to deal with this discomfort more often, too.

It was somewhere around the third song that I realized what I was doing. I shook my head at myself.

Talena, only a self-preservation Enneagram Three like you would sit in the very back of a church you’ve been attending for eighteen years and worry about what everyone else might be thinking of you. They’re not thinking of you! And you shouldn’t care if they do.

Okay, then, replied the other voice in my head. (Having a conversation with myself like this is normal, right? It is for me.) Well, I hope God’s okay with my mediocre singing today.

…And I hope I can get out the door after the service without anyone noticing so I can avoid those uncomfortable conversations about what value I may or may not have added to the service today. From the back of the church balcony, where I showed up late. Even though it wasn’t much. I used to do so much more at the church, but I just don’t have the energy anymore. But I feel so guilty for not contributing like I used to.

I might have been singing, “There’s joy in the house of the Lord,” but I was feeling anything but joyful. My anxiety was ratcheting up with every new thought, and it took everything in me not to flee to escape the (probably non-existent) judgement of others—but mostly, the judgement of myself for worrying about it.

You may have noticed the glaring omission in my self-talk already. I’m ashamed to say that this is Tuesday of the week this conversation with myself took place, and I only recognized it this morning—not once, in all of that questioning, did I ask myself if I was enjoying my singing. Not once did I say to myself anything resembling, Good job. That was a tough chord, and you nailed it. Not only that, it felt great to hit it right on pitch. Not once did I think, Wow, does it ever feel great to be here with my fellow believers and friends. What an opportunity for self-compassion and joyful celebration with people I care about, and to love on them too!

I did notice that I’d superficially transferred my others-referencing tendency from the people around me to God. And, even though I felt a bit silly about that too—because of course God would be happy I was there singing worship songs in church, even if my melodies were more like a joyful noise instead of angelic melodies (which they weren’t, and who was I even comparing myself to?)—that didn’t remove the shame of the self-talk that wondered if anyone had noticed me and my subsequent self-recriminations for hoping they had. (A hope I didn’t even want to admit to myself, and if anyone had, by the way, I would die of shame knowing about it.)

No wonder the Enneagram labels the passion of the Three as vanity or self-deceit. We’re constantly aware of how others perceive us, which means we’re always vigilant to ensure we’re presenting value to the world so we won’t be found wanting. In so doing, we deceive ourselves in thinking that our worth is tied to what we do or how we look, not who we are.

As the countertype of the Three, I feel like I got a double whammy—not only do I tie my worth to my accomplishments, believing those will give me the attention I seek to feel valuable, but, as a self-preservation Three, I also abhor seeking any attention for those accomplishments, feel embarrassed if I actually receive it, and pretend like it doesn’t matter to me whether or not someone else has noticed the hard work I’ve put into anything I’ve done.

In other words, I walk through life extremely self-conscious, and a good chunk of that self-consciousness is in making sure I don’t look self-conscious.

Other self-preservation Threes get it. If this isn’t you, you probably don’t understand how exposing the lie in my core operating system to the light of day makes me want to crawl out of my skin right now. After all, this whole post is self-conscious—the antithesis of the carefully constructed systems I use to protect myself! I want to delete it all and go do something that will make me feel productive and worthy until the bad feelings go away.

But I won’t, because there’s a reason I’m opening the door and letting you peek at the woman behind the curtain.

Multiple reasons, actually, and they are the impetus behind the shift I’m hoping you’ll see in my upcoming blogging frequency.

(And, to be honest, I’m totally going to go self-soothe with work after this. I’m just not going to delete this post first. Small wins.)

Uprooting the Weeds

When my husband and I bought this property fifteen years ago, the very first thing we built on it were raised garden beds.

We didn’t even have a well dug or power run in yet. But I knew I wanted to grow a vegetable garden and gain some food independence, and this property has maybe a half-inch of topsoil covering mostly clay and gravel. So, I got some wood from a friend of ours who had just replaced their deck and repurposed it into six four-by-eight beds. Then, based on my research (I was working on theoretical knowledge, because I hadn’t actually gardened before), I filled them with a mixture of topsoil, peat moss, compost, and sand and, very excitedly, I planted my first crop—peas and carrots.

As the season progressed, I used a friend’s water tank and my husband’s red Ford Ranger pickup to provide moisture for my needy little seedlings. I made a trip to the property every few days to water and keep the soil free of weeds.

Oh, the joy when the first little shoots poked their way through the soil! Soon, they had grown a couple of inches and their first leaves were filling out.

However, the problem with this strategy soon became apparent. Since no one was living here—in what was essentially an open field tucked into the middle of bushy wilderness—the deer had no idea that those succulent shoots weren’t up for grabs. Only a month or so into my first little gardening venture, I was devastated to find that my cute baby plants had been sheared off at the dirt.

Needless to say, our next addition to the property, along with the seen-better-days mobile home we’d just moved onto it, was a dog. And I didn’t get any peas that year.

As the years passed, my gardening experience grew. I got more and better tools. I expanded my garden beds and replaced the rotting-out ones covered in toxic paint from that original free wood. And I grew all kinds of vegetables.

I haven’t lost an entire crop to the deer again. (They give our yard a wide berth now, for two good reasons named Hiro and Daisy.) But I’ve faced a lot of other challenges that any gardener will commiserate with. Mosquitoes, drought, grasshoppers, noxious weeds, infestations of red ants, quackgrass, dogs and cats and chickens digging holes in my beds, the short growing season we have this far north… I’ve dealt with all of these with varying degrees of success. I even made the egregious error of intentionally seeding dew worms into my garden, thinking they were beneficial earthworms, and have fought a constant (and losing) battle to maintain my beautiful hard-earned soil ever since.

But none of these challenges were what made me give up gardening.

No, like so many things I’ve given up in the past nine years, the death of my gardening fervour can be attributed to the loss of motivation and energy brought on by the trauma and grief of losing my son nine years ago (and several traumas since), and the subsequent shift in my focus to growing and developing my writing career.

I haven’t put a crop in those beds for eight years. Last spring, under the influence of a short-lived burst of motivation and energy and a latent sense of guilt, I assessed the condition of my garden beds with the notion of picking up the hobby again. Quackgrass, ants, and rot have taken over. After eight years of neglect, the dew worms have turned my lovely soil into almost unusable clay. The amount of work it would take to get my garden back to productive and healthy is probably more than it took to build it in the first place.

Would it be worth doing? Yes. But, thanks to health issues and where I’ve chosen to spend my limited energy, I haven’t been in a place to tackle it yet.

I’m getting there. I’m recovering from both the health issues and the trauma, and I keep looking out my window thinking not just that I should do something about my garden, but occasionally that I want to. So that’s a step.

And while I’ve taken a hiatus from vegetable gardening, there’s been more internal growth happening than I would have imagined possible. Discovering the Enneagram a little over two years ago and the subsequent work I’ve done has been no small part of that. It’s only because of that growth I’m even considering getting my hands dirty in the soil again.

In other words, before I could turn my attention back to the garden in my back yard, I needed to uproot the weeds growing in the garden of my soul.

Refocusing on Joy

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I actually want.

One of the traps of the Enneagram Three is that we get so busy trying to figure out what other people want so we can achieve value by delivering it to them that we rarely take the time to think about what we want and what we find fulfilling. Part of the trap is that we believe fulfilling other people’s expectations is fulfilling. If I’m helping others and giving them value, I feel great! So of course that’s what I want.

But… is it?

Obviously, yes, helping others is a wonderful thing, especially if we’re doing it while also doing something we enjoy. Getting to the point where a Three is unselfishly using what we’ve learned while pursuing our many passions to mentor, coach, and bless others, and earning a living while doing so, is a way to take the shadow of our type and turn it into a blessing.

But we can still get so caught up in delivering value to others that we neglect the things that give value to ourselves. Especially when the fight to achieve the success and excellence we strive for is beset by so many challenges—changing industries, changing technology, a changing economy, and more. We can get so busy staying on top of the tactics required to excel in these shifting sands that we forget there’s more to life than riding the Great Sand Worm to our next destination—that there’s joy in the ride, and, quite aside from the pursuit of anything, simple pleasures in small moments that feed our soul.

It’s these moments of simply being that remind us Threes that we’re worth more than what we’re doing. We need to lean into them and make space for them so we don’t forget what they feel like. So we can remember how to stand in a church service and enter joyfully into worship in communion with people we care about instead of self-consciously wondering if all the eyes turned the other direction are secretly staring at us.

And these are the moments I’ve been thinking about as I strive to create a sustainable life for myself. They’ve prompted me to ask myself questions such as this:

• What fulfills me most?

• What do I enjoy?

• Who am I right now, and who do I want to become?

• What could I see myself doing for the next twenty-plus years?

• How can I make room for the activities I enjoy just for the pleasure of doing them, such as gardening or playing piano, in the midst of striving for my lofty goals?

These are questions I’ll need to continually ask, because our Enneagram type isn’t something we can simply shed like a worn-out coat once we see the holes in it. Recognizing and working with our patterns is more like shedding a skin when it becomes too uncomfortable—there’s still more skin beneath it, and it’s still our skin and made of essentially the same stuff, it just fits better.

However, as I grow the next version of the skin I’ll be living in for a while, I’ve defined some new goals—new “milestones of success,” if you will.

I want to make space for myself to own my own value. To spend less time worrying about what others want or expect from me.

I’ve learned that while I’ve been paying so much attention to what others say I need to do to succeed in my chosen career (or in life in general), I’ve neglected more than my vegetable garden—my soul garden has also suffered and become overgrown with weeds. This has made it difficult to enjoy life, but it’s also meant I’ve often felt I had little to give to the very career I’m trying to grow or people who matter most to me, which is totally counterproductive.

It’s time to make more space to nurture and grow the things that feed the fruit I truly want to give to the world.

I’m not going to lie, it’s already been a lot of work. But I know it will be totally worth it.

Further Up and Further In

The shadow of the Three may be vanity, but the gift of the Three is authenticity.

I’ve always striven to be authentic, but I look back and realize that, like gardening, I’ve had varying degrees of success.

Often, even when I thought I was being authentic, I was actually trying to bolster my own ego. I may have typed a post like this, then gone back and taken out all those unflattering bits at the beginning that leave me wriggling in shame and left only the lesson I learned at the end. And if I left the raw pain or ugliness in a post, it was often from a place of neediness—wanting validation and support instead of revealing a part of myself that I already knew was flawed and that I’m still actively working on.

I’m not going to lie, the thought of hitting publish on this post makes my mouth a little dry in a way I haven’t experienced for many years. But it’s also a promise to myself—a promise to be bolder and more honest with myself and others going forward. And I want to give others permission to recognize their own flaws and the work they need to do, too.

Part of my journey has been in recognizing that my own needs do have value. It’s okay that I need someone to tell me that I’m okay, and that I’m valued in the world for more than my work. That needing others to support me does not make me a burden or selfish or a failure but part of this beautiful thing called being human. It was the neglect of this personal affirmation and an overemphasis on the value of my efforts (among other things) that created this wound in the first place, and perpetuating the problem is no way to heal.

But on the flip side, until I can look at myself and tell myself that I’m okay, that I have value without doing a darn thing, and that it’s okay if no one else in the whole world loves me because I do, none of the validation and support others give will mean anything, anyway. I need to be able to say to myself, You may not be perfect, but you don’t have to be for me to love you. I love your imperfect parts too.

And singing, even singing badly, makes you happy, so it doesn’t matter how others perceive it.

Audience Growth vs. Personal Growth

While actively seeking the attention of an audience makes me want to crawl in a hole and stay there, since I have to market in order to have a career, I’ve decided I should lean into joy while I do so. The question is, how?

I hate the process of constantly creating content for social media, even though I love the many positive interactions and connections I’ve made with others there.

However, I love the creative exploration of long-form blogging, but I miss the social connection I used to experience in the blogosphere of the late ’00s when lively comments sections and blog communities abounded—nowadays, people would usually rather leave a comment on the Facebook post in which I shared the blog post (if the algorithm actually shows it to them) than in the comments section of someone’s website, which I actually understand. It feels safer to leave a comment (or, more often, a reaction) on a familiar platform, even if it’s just as public as someone’s website. (I struggle with it too, and I know how illogical it is!)

So, since that’s the reality, what am I going to do about it while also honouring my own conflicting needs of garnering audience attention and community in order to have an author career while not doing it in a way that puts my mental health in the toilet?

Honestly, this is something I’ve struggled with for as long as I’ve been writing professionally. I’ve found a few ways to market effectively that I enjoy—for instance, I have a wonderful author newsletter, which I enjoy creating and which has connected me with a lot of amazing people. But how can I nurture even deeper relationships with my community and invite more people into it in a way that feels good in my soul?

For now, I’m going to try an experiment with blogging the way I used to blog, when I loved it—sharing stories, life lessons, silly tidbits, behind-the-scenes updates, and even introducing my characters as though they’re real people (instead of telling cute stories about my kids like I did back then). I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I hope you, dear reader, find enough value in my stories, opinions, and personal therapy sessions that you want to stick around, and maybe even put yourself out there a little bit in my comments section, too, so we can truly connect.

But even if you don’t, even if no one joins me on this journey, walking it has value for me. From the early days, this blog was about sharing my joy and art and putting my messiness on the page. Tilling this soil has always produced fruit of some kind. So it’s time I dug out the weeds I’ve let grow in the cracks and start allowing the Holy Spirit’s fruit to grow and ripen in this space… not because others expect me to, but because I need to.

So please excuse the mud, but you can’t grow beautiful things without getting a little dirty in the process. I hope you enjoy the fruit I’m slowly uncovering.

Thank you for reading this far, my friend. If you got through that entire post, I probably already know your name… and if I don’t, I’d like to.

Either way, it would mean the world to me to know that you enjoyed this content and would like more of it (because, whether I like it or not, it’s always more motivating to me to create for others instead of only myself). If you’re feeling brave, please leave a comment or send me a message. If you’d like to be more subtle in your support but you don’t want to miss the show, please be sure and subscribe to this blog or join my reader community, the Books and Tea League. And please share this with your friends.

Life is hard, but it’s easier together. I look forward to digging in to the dirt with you.

Talena