You are not:
An empath, highly sensitive person, introvert.
Your Human Design, Enneagram or Myers Briggs type.
I’ve personally invested thousands of dollars on journeys through astrology, Human Design, Enneagram, Wealth Dynamics, Myers Briggs, DISC assessment.
They’ve been useful at revealing my conditioned thinking and the identity I think of as me.
But none of these ARE me. They are experiences moving through me.
When I think of them as my identity, I become trapped and limited…
…when my natural state is open, curious and far more flexible than my mind tells me.
For every example where I was “clearly” an introvert, I can point to another where my behavior was most certainly extroverted.
It seems far more true, and useful, to think, “I am having a Human Design Projector experience,” rather than, “I’m a Projector, and therefore I’m like this…”
Experts and teachers have created brilliant personality systems and frameworks to help us see these things about ourselves…
…but all too often we use them to limit what we see as possible.
These systems cannot ever describe the totality of what you are as a being of infinite potential.
What if you meet yourself in this moment as if it’s the first time?
Without the labels and stories…
What are you being now?
The truth is that I don’t know how I will feel in the future, much as I might tell stories about it. (And I do!)
“When I’m in a group of strangers, I feel shy,” I say.
What if I show up with a group of strangers and simply notice my experience?
It might be shyness. It might be outgoing-ness. It might be something I’ve never experienced before in my life.
(Point of fact, every experience is a brand new one, even if it seems similar to those that have come before.)
What I see so often is that a person grows up with a label that seems to limit them in a certain way (autistic, shy, sensitive.)
They recognize the limitation. Hooray!
And then replace it with a new, more acceptable label: neural divergent, introvert, INFP.
It’s not that these labels in themselves are damaging. They’re simply made up concepts we use to communicate ideas.
It’s when we begin thinking that we ARE our labels, taking them as true, that we live into them in ways that don’t serve us.
This is an invitation, not a demand, for you to question your labels.
Which feels more expansive:
The thought that you are destined to repeat the patterns and behaviors of your type?
Or the thought that you are a living, dynamically responsive being, alive and emerging in this moment?
Yours in creative play,
Steph
