By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum
So-called personality tests are everywhere. Quizzes to help you identify strengths and proclivities, your temperament and pathologies, categorize your personality and clarify your role. A lot of them are junk, some are helpful, and there’s a lot of overlap too.
Whether you’ve been labeled “Blue,” “ISFP,” “Concrete/Sequential,” “Sanguine,” “Lion,” or a “Type 4 with a 5 Wing,” any system has a chance of getting you right purely by accident. And because the primary inputs are your self-image, the outputs are predictable: You’ll see that self-image staring back at you in the results. But the systems with some validity, when compared to one another over time, tend to point in the same general direction of truth.
Watching recent events unfold and reflecting on my responses to them has reminded me of the general direction these systems have pointed me. Let me sketch it out.
From an early age, I was hyper-aware of other’s emotions. There was a lot of drama in my blended family (alcoholism, sexual abuse, violence) and as the youngest child saddled with a misguided sense of responsibility for everyone else’s feelings, I worked hard to fix things; bridge gaps, resolve conflict, make peace. At a minimum, I made sure I was always being “good”; not adding to the drama.
This “peace-making” carried into adolescence and grew more nuanced, eventually masking the truth that it was largely an effort to create my own safe environment when no one else would. It blended with other emerging “skills” in young adulthood to present itself in positive ways one might label diplomacy, charm or the gift of gab, and in less-than-positive terms like cowardice, dishonesty and flattery.
Slowly, through my 30s and 40s, with help from my faith community, professional guidance and a few of these self-discovery systems, I was able to largely grasp and own who I am. My 50s were spent grappling with how to love my neighbor in light of that understanding. All of these are, of course, on-going efforts I anticipate will take me to the grave.
But, returning to recent events, I feel I have experienced a kind of regression. Everywhere I turn, I’m surrounded by division, hostility and even violence. I feel like a 7-year-old again, standing in the kitchen, tasting hot tears and that awful lump in my throat, overwhelmed by the yelling, slammed doors, exits and threats. “How can I make it better?” Eventually, someone looks down, takes pity, and hustles me off to some room by myself to continue crying as I listen to the now muffled shouting and wonder when it will all come crashing down.
I feel like a 15-year-old again, wondering, “Is it me that’s the problem? Maybe I should learn to care ‘who started it.’ Maybe I should just pick a side and give up on the idea of peace? But I love all of them. Even the ones who are behaving badly. I just want us to be together. Is it wrong that I just want us to be together?”
These tears taste so familiar. Yet, I have put away childish things. So, I choose to honor those memories by putting them gently to rest.
My role as a peacemaker may have its origins in brokenness and strife, it may have begun as an instinctive coping mechanism, but that makes it no less legitimate when redeemed. It may open me to charges of cowardice, denial, apathy or delusion, even from those I love. Well, I will shoulder those accusations as needed, but for the sake of those I love this time.
I choose the Third Way. I choose the path to reconciliation, to understanding, repentance and forgiveness. It is finally, the only safe place.
Dan Hazen lives in Marysville and works in Everett.
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