We have a lot of Enneagram 4s on the forum and this type is a bit of a mystery to me. For those of you are 4s, can you explain how you experience life as a 4? How do you see the fixations/vices of a 4 - melancholy, fantasizing, envy - as distorting how you experience life on a day to day basis? How strong of an influence or grip do those things have on you?
It comes and goes. For the past several years, I have maintained that I don't really get the envy thing. I'm happy when other people do well -- happy for them, and happy to see something go right in the universe in general. I thought somehow I was immune to the envy thing. Then I started hanging out in places where stay-at-home-moms with husbands who make good money hang out, and OH. MY. GOD. wow. I'm eaten up with envy. Sick with it. Hate my life because I've been working since I was 17 and I'll work until I die, can never afford to retire, can take days off but not a vacation because I can't afford to go anywhere, etc. etc. While they post things like "Why does fb make me approve pictures I post from my iphone? What if I have a shopping emergency and can't post a pic of my intended outfit to get comments on?" and I realize this person basically never has to go to work, never has to sweat the mortgage payment, it makes me sick with envy. I have to laugh at it, it's so extreme. It's painful. I can't make it go away so I have to live with it. (Objectively I realize there may be things in her life that I would not want, that nothing's ever as it seems, that I might be bored to tears with her life, etc., but there's an envy state I can't deny that is extremely powerful, nearly crippling, when it kicks in. Also, I like the person I referenced in the example. I just hate my life that I can never have even a little bit of that part of what she has.)
Melancholy is just a form of beauty that happy people can't recognize, like the way other species see colors we can't see. Melancholy is comforting and soothing and familiar and good. I also prefer rain to sunny weather, and cold to hot, and slow, sad songs to fast, happy ones.
I fantasize constantly, always have. Don't know what else to say about that. Seems just to be the way my brain works, making visions and inhabiting the visions.
ETA: I just went back and read what others had written. I understand Amar's saying she searches for true love in everything. There's a state of bliss that once achieved, you keep searching for. Sometimes I wonder if it's like heroin. They say your first hit is what hooks you, that it will never be that good again, but you keep doing it, wanting to feel just like that one more time. I feel that way about most of my life. Slightly on edge, wishing for a state of bliss that I catch glimpses of or sometimes get for brief periods, wishing it could always be that way, thinking about what it would take to make it that way, fantasizing that it is that way, getting excited if someone else comes up with a plan for a better way and wanting to participate in the effort while simultaneously realizing it's futile and we're all dust in the wind, recalling Ozymandias, wondering what's the use. I wonder what's the use a lot. Then I wonder why I wonder, and wish I didn't care.
Basically, something's always bothering me, and I'm always wishing it didn't. I feel out of joint with what I'm called upon to do and be in this life. I feel like I don't belong here, like somewhere there is a planet I came from where I do belong, and I'm constantly homesick for that place. I feel like just due to the fact of being a mortal on this planet, I can't fully express who I am. I feel confined and limited, or, to put it more like I experience it, crippled and imprisoned, by my life. And then I read all this and hate myself for being whiny. Totally understand Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath, et al, too, because how could it be otherwise.