morn·​ings

There was a short, seemingly insignificant sentence in Jenny Slate's Little Weirds (which is phenomenal, by the way) about how she and her heart felt immediately upon waking up one morning. I'm curious about that - what's going on in my body and brain as I'm waking up? Allow me to follow my curiosity - here are some notations of the very first things I identified in my brain and body each morning for a week:

Day 1: Sunday

Briefly, I feel a thick rubberband gripping loosely around my temples. I didn’t sleep very well, repeatedly pressing myself deeper into a manual rest. There’s a thin veil of fleshed out cotton balls draped over my brain, so all the sounds have a slight blur. My feet crack satisfyingly as I circle them in the air above my bed. I hear the cheers of marathon supporters outside my apartment, though I can’t see them from my window. I think back to cheering on my ex as he ran the same marathon 2 years ago. Let Light be Light is playing in my head as I walk to the bathroom. My lower back is aching, and as I reach back to touch it, I feel how smooth my skin is.

Day 2: Monday

The alarm is so chipper I want to punch it. The bottoms of my feet feel like I stomped grapes with them, and my first thought is a bitter resentment towards the fact that work will be unproductive today & that I don’t have the support of my Chicago team for our Canadian training since it’s a US holiday. My eyes are crusty. I wanna love you but I don’t is in my head.

Day 3: Tuesday

Dream: After wandering through a massive labyrinth of dressing rooms with thrift store shirts and jackets, very Shein and Urban Outfitters, we ended up in a massive bathroom where I peed for like 2 minutes straight & a guy came up next to me and told me he was doing a cold wash (gargling mouthwash I guess), I’m like “cool dude go away” - and I thought I’d have peed my pants since the peeing felt so real in the dream. But no, all good, just an aggressive, 2319-esque alarm that jarred me awake. My back & wrist hurt from yoga & from reading propped up sideways on my bed last night.

Day 4: Wednesday

A dream involving sitting a group and I on top of the roof of a boarding home/restaurant, resting our feet on a tall, precarious stack of books and bookshelves until we (okay, I) accidentally knock them down and they tumble down from the roof onto the cars below. Some of the rubble landed on a short, balding man’s car & we could hear him cursing loudly. There was an auto shop across the street (with very inconsistent parking rules), so no problem. Lots of old people (plus Timothee Chalamait I think?) were hooking up in that boarding house. It was styled very Victorian, a labyrinth inside. I can feel my nose ring. I take a few morning toe touches in bed - love those. Mean Something plays in my head.

Day 5: Thursday

Woke up to a cool breeze and loud rain from the window by my head. Pure Imagination plays in my head as I untangle myself from my rat's nest of blanket/pillow (I keep a pillow between my knees, since it's good for your back when you're a side sleeper - which is good for your lungs by the way. But the pillow always gets Amuk! Amuk! Amuk! Amuk!). My back always hurts in the morning, I realize as I walk to the bathroom, considering how my dreams were affected by the movie I watched last night.

Day 6: Friday

I awoke drooling on my curled bicep. My head feels like a dehydrated perfume pillow, since I drank last night. Good in Bed loops in my head as I fumble my way out of my covers. I hear myself make a slight tear in my quilt, which makes me quickly awake and quietly sad. Leaving a dream in which I was a new member (or understudy?) of a theatrical dance group performing in a huge futuristic competition (the stage was a floating square; there was a storyline & characters & the audience was massive. Like several colosseums massive. The energy and competition felt like the fight for the kingdom in Black Panther. At one point, Will, Elle, Chris and I were together at an old timey diner, and then members of the dance crew came in and showed us that it was confusing and hard being friends with us Schwaars when we as siblings are so close. They came and stood in between us, making this ladder helix thing and lifted us up or something to effectively disconnect us. It felt like a great analogy in the dream (though unnecessarily divisive). Then I was in the house we were staying at (the dance crew) and it was covered in sawdust and they’d been communicating with either Sara Bareilles or the speaker from the Ted talk I watched last night (they have similar appearances).

Day 7: Saturday

Soaking up the snooze. All sorts of conversations, garbage trucks, and other ambient noises from my alley-side windows. Where do I go plays in my head. As I stand up, I feel the space in my collarbones widen, like someone is easing themselves into them, sliding gingerly in like a hot tub.

camp·ing

We love camping because we love the things we associate with it. Like s’mores. But then we commodify s'mores so that we can have them whenever we want - we make them in our backyards or on our stovetops, thereby eliminating the need for (and allure of) camping. What if we were to say that we’re excited about camping and love it because of the things only camping can bring? Like the smell of the woods in the morning or the long hikes or pitching the tent. Extrapolating: What if we loved our people because of the things they specifically give, rather than the things that practically all friends or partners provide like good companionship and/or physicality? How do we remind ourselves to look at the things that distinguish each person in our circle from the countless people who have come into and out of our lives? How do we say "this is why I chose to invest in you, specifically you"? How do we articulate the reasons that we continually choose to reach out to that one friend versus the 10 others who you left off with a "we should absolutely hang out soon!"? Good, again: I grew up in a household where cereal was eaten as sweet-and-unsweeet. If we wanted to eat Fruity Pebbles or Honey Nut Cheerios, there'd better be some Corn Flakes or regular Cheerios in that bowl too (to dilute the cavity-inducing forces of Captain Crunch, et al). I used to love summer camp, because at camp we could eat bowls of just sweet cereal. I mean it; I was really out there with a full bowl of Lucky Charms, no Raisin Bran in sight (which did in fact count as an unsweet cereal in the Schwaar house, despite the 17g of sugar per serving). What was not as special to me was swimming at the lake or hearing the worship music, because those were things that mimicked a normal part of my at-home life. What makes things special is their rarity; we all know this, yes? Take a second to identify what you just adore about your best friend. What stimulates you about your conversations with that one colleague? What turns you on about your partner in a way no one else can? Many of these things are likely indescribable - maybe you just exist on the same luminescent life channel, flowing like the Yellowstone River in a way that mesmerizes and invites. These feelings bind us in an indescribable way, like a dragon to its rider, a wizard to their wand. But I think there are golden, glowing pieces of our relationships that can also be verbalized, carried from intuition to affirmation - the type of affirmation that strengthens and binds. These articulations have the power to turn coworkers into confidants, parents into friends, and lovers into life partners. Feels ambitious, maybe unnecessary. And maybe amazing.

en·​nea·​gram

Personality tests and I don't get along well. We never have. And yet I'm drawn to them like a shopaholic to an Everything Must Go sign, a Schwaar to a thrift store, and an overthinker to a second (third, fourth, fifth) follow-up text. Like sheep to the Freaking SLAUGHTER.

I love tests; I love results. I love immediate results, and I love being analyzed. But I hate feeling misrepresented. And I hate feeling like I messed up and answered questions incorrectly (which must be the case every time I disagree with a personality test result, right? And I traditionally disagree with all my results). So I loathe them, despite my addiction.

A practice that's helped me cope with my irritating addiction to personality tests is the creation of a completely separate way of self-identifying, one that's messier but far more true. It's an iPhone note titled On Me. Whenever I identify characteristics that ring true for me, that resound in my chest and wrap me in a blanket of relatability, I write them in this note. When I can finally craft a generalization of how I engage with arguments, my relationship to affirmation, or a consistent fear, I jot it down in this note. Fewer and fewer bullets will need to be added as I continue solidifying, but it will never be complete, just like I'll never be a finished piece.

Here's where it gets interesting (for me, at least): For the longest time, I was torn between identifying as a 3 and a 1 on the enneagram. I was logic-minded as I grew up, and I loved math and grammar, order and organization, integrity and honesty, etc. This all pointed towards me being a 1, but I knew that achieving was a huge driver for what I did & that I needed affirmation consistently, almost constantly, driving me towards the more people-pleasing 3 type.

I remember when I came out to my brother (spoiler, I like boys) in 2018, saying that I felt like a 1 that had started exhibiting 4 symptoms because I was in a time of stress. It felt like a revelation, a real click in my brain, like the satisfying last slide of the red car in that Rush Hour board game (iykyk). I was a 1, and the reason I was being dramatique was because I was grappling with my sexuality/faith collision - makes sense!

Fast forward a couple years, and my more fully-cooked brain chose to start identifying myself (in the inevitable "what's your enneagram?" conversations we Christians/post-Christians get into) as a 3, wing 4: an Achiever with strong Individualist tendencies. I've craved the promise of achievement that grad school offers, the allure of academic success. I aim to balance a room & keep the conversation going, pleasing those around me to the point of showmanship. But what I'm finding, apart from these characteristic 3 traits is the persistent recurrence of attributes like "melancholic expression", "a sense of emptiness", "quirky and endearing", and "determined to understand the truth of their experience," which are textbook 4 traits as you can tell by the quotation marks.

A week ago, this is where I sat: I cannot say with any certainty what type I am, though I'm relatively certain that it dances somewhere on the bridge between 3 and 4, likely leaning towards a home base in fourdom. I see my 4-ness as a restless child that keeps sneaking downstairs after they're put to bed, coming a stair or two lower each time before being whisked back to bed. After being worn down by the child's persistence, the babysitter in my brain resigns to let it sit on the stairs or sleep on the lower landing, within view but out of reach, away from the spotlight.

But the following excerpt reads to me today as an invitation for that sleepy child to come take center stage, sweeping its Oscar de la Renta train as it finds its light, smiling with a single Kacey Musgraves tear on its cheek:

"[Average Fours] try to understand themselves by introspecting on their feelings. As they move inward in search for self, the become so acutely self-conscious that their subjective emotional states become the dominant reality for them." - Don Richard Riso & Russ Hudson, Personality Types

So it's less of a light that this 4-child is finding, and more of a comfortable gloomy corner, but boy did they find it. They may not be ready to perform, like Baby Annette freezing on that spooky spire stage, but they are ready to learn and stop being relegated to their shadowy bedroom. There is a lot I look back on and wish I could change, knowing how my actions were likely guided by unhealthy four tendencies. My desperation for intense emotional connections early on in a relationship; my occasional tendency to soak in depressive clouds without a desire to exit them; even my adverse relationship to personality tests - these could be a whole series of therapy sessions.

My heart and my brain are in a fistfight right now, because I want to go back to my most recent ex and say, "I understand myself so much better now! I was asking too much of you too quickly, because I'm a 4! I get too emotionally involved, and I have a 3 wing, so I get too self-involved as well, isn't that fun? I'm both impossible to hate and impossible to love! I'm scared of nothing except my own self, because I'm a complicated monster who simultaneously drudges and dances through every day, hoping to find someone to love me for who I am, even though I don't know who that is. I dove into us, because I couldn't believe you wanted to date me…so when you agreed to, I latched on like an barnacle. And now here I am, having scared you off with my emotional intensity and need for affection. with my broad non-textbook-Chicago-gay interests and skills and quirks that make me both amazing and exhausting. date me again?..."

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Knowing my type, I can choose to alter the weight I give my daily emotions, doubts, and insecurities. I can harness the strength of my logical mind and use it to set reasonable expectations for myself and those with whom I'm in relationship. I can zoom out and take a snapshot of myself, a 3-D index of my character, which is both boundless and observable like the northern lights, streaming within the confines of our atmosphere. I'll hang this x-ray in my kitchen with a clothespin, bordered by definition-enhancing white margins. An image like this will help disillusion me about my boundlessness, my inability to be understood and therefore fully loved, my perpetual fear of being too much, because that glossy, rainbowed photo paper will show me just how finite I am. Someone once said, regarding Type 3s, something that gave me great comfort (regardless of my core type):

"Similar to 2s, 3s gauge their worth based on people's feelings towards them, and so to be told that you're too much to be in a relationship with feels like a value statement. If you walk into a relationship hoping for it to assure you that you are not too much to be loved, you will be let down, because if that relationship doesn't work, that just confirms for you your fear that you are too much to be loved. However, if you walk into a relationship saying I'm gonna allow this relationship to teach me how to love my too much-ness, then you have released that other person from the unfair responsibility of assuring you that you're not too much. Yes, your authentic self is gonna be too much for some people. But those are not your people." -@rudeassenneagram

My depth of feelings seems to be increasing almost daily, pummeling downhill at an alarming pace (like Westley or Thackery Binx). It is both a capacity to feel and an incapacity to moderate those emotions. It is foggy and whiplash-inducing, and my days can be turned on their heads by the sight of an ex or the receipt of a parking ticket as quickly and significantly as only the news of a tragedy would turn others' days upside down. To boil it down, I'm a drama queen. That known, that declared, that acknowledged, I can begin to learn and modify the course. I can begin to choose emotion-informed logic as a decision maker and mood-moderator, rather than emotion-steered amorphism.

"One of the biggest challenges Fours face is learning to let go of feelings from the past; they tend to nurse wounds and hold onto negative feelings about those who have hurt them. Indeed, Fours can become so attached to longing and disappointment that they are unable to recognize the many treasures in their lives." - Enneagram Institute

This knowledge, combined with consistent yoga, has led me to more clarity of mind than I've experienced in a long time. I feel like I'm in an atmospheric hot tub, my body soaking and swirling in jet streams of the quotidian, my head peeking above a bumpy quilt of pink, gold, and blue clouds. This is the feeling I experience when gazing at open water - the mesmerizing motion of Lake Michigan's tide reminding me that we're each just one piece of a 7.9 billion piece puzzle that no one can (or really should try to) put together perfectly. In my hot tub I can see my choices like bao buns and potstickers on a dim sum cart being generously wheeled over to me as I soak, and I know this: I could try 100 different dishes if I want. And once I've taken a bite of each, I cannot undo my having tasted that dish. But I can set it back down after a bite and elect to move onto another. And while I may have disliked that dish, maybe even been harmed by its spice or its price, I learned about both it and myself by tasting it. And I can choose to say, "Ouch my mouth" or "Ouch my wallet," or I can say, "Wow what a treat to know, in an Edisonian way, what doesn’t work for me and, by process of elimination, what I'm looking for in the future." Active learning, here in the hot tub / clouds, is my current resting state, and I'm so thankful.

"You are unique, and if that has not been fulfilled, then something has been lost." - Martha Graham (a Four)

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“Anyone who knows me, should learn to know me again; For I am like the Moon, you will see me with new face everyday.” - Rumi (a Four)