The Peacemaker
It is with great shame that I make the following admission: I, a rational and intellectually serious soon-to-be lawyer, love personality tests. In fact, according to the deepest trenches of my Facebook page, between March and May of 2009, I took fourteen of them:
What State Are You? (March 26, 2009)
What Drink Are You? (March 26, 2009)
what sport fits you? (April 13, 2009)
What Type of Eyes Do You Have? (April 14, 2009)
What Pokémon from the original 151 are you? (April 15, 2009)
What Grey’s Anatomy character are you? (April 19, 2009)
Are you on a boat? (April 19, 2009)
What type of shoes are you? (April 26, 2009)
What is your true eye color? (May 3, 2009)
Which infectious disease are you? (May 6, 2009)
Which crazy bitch are you? (May 10, 2009)
What Rock Band Are U? (May 13, 2009)
Which of the 7 Dwarfs are you? (May 23, 2009)
My obsession with personality tests is, according to the results of my Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (“RHETI”) test, rooted in the fact that as a Type 9 (“The Peacemaker”), I lack a strong sense of identity—in fact, for me, “being a separate self, an individual who must assert herself against others, is terrifying.” Type 9s “[f]ear conflict, so become self-effacing and accommodating, idealizing others and ‘going along’ with their wishes, saying ‘yes’ to things they do not really want to do.” In other words, we Type 9s are total fucking pushovers.
In the third grade, I allowed my homeroom teacher, Ms. Stickle, to coax me into delivering a tearful and sincerely remorseful apology for having used crayons as projectiles in art class, when, as it turned out, there had been a terrible miscommunication and it was in fact Julia Lu, a second grader, who had launched the crayon missiles.
By the time I reached college, my people-pleasing compulsion had spiraled out of control. So had my spending habits, which, combined with the aforementioned people-pleasing compulsion, was the kind of one-two punch that left me driving a homeless panhandler from Target to Amtrak and buying her a ticket to L.A. with my gas money. My only job at the time consisted in explaining analytic philosophy and providing essay feedback to my peers (read: writing their essays), a job I obtained by unintentionally signaling to my classmates that, if asked nicely, I would do just about anything for just about anyone. This job, however, paid only in coffee, and I desperately needed a job that would pay me in money.
Paid, part-time jobs flexible enough for a full-time student were few and far between, so I started off with odd jobs—showing an elderly woman how to use Blogspot, helping a busy mother organize the garage, that sort of thing. When a listing requesting bi-monthly assistance in household chores and light cleaning on an anytime-you-like basis popped up, I jumped at the chance, only to find myself dry-heaving while doing my damn best to deep clean the most disgusting bathroom I, a person who has traveled all over China and also entered many an American gas station restroom, have ever seen in my life. (For the record, I did such a good job that my morbidly obese one-time employer exclaimed, “My, the toilet is so clean you could practically eat out of it!”)
Next, I tried babysitting. The parents worked at their small, family-owned restaurant, so the hours (4 p.m. to 9 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday) aligned nicely with my school schedule. And how bad could it be? I liked kids well enough; in fact—until this babysitting gig—I always imagined that I would one day have children of my own.
My charges were Sonya,* a sweet but manically excitable seven-year-old, and her five-year-old brother Elliot,* who had the raging temperament of a tiny hippopotamus that is also a little bit insane. Triggers that provoked Elliot’s wrath included all manner of seemingly innocent trivialities, such as being subjected to bathwater ever-so-slightly too warm for his liking; being asked to put things like his Legos or his penis away; failing to score a goal in what he called “soccer” (“You’re going too hard!”); succeeding in scoring a goal in “soccer” (“You’re going easy on purpose!”); sitting on my lap, as he often insisted upon doing (“You’re not comfy like my [significantly more voluptuous] mom.”); or getting only one of the two toys I bought for him and his sister with my babysitting money (“I want more than her.”) But nothing provoked him more than his sister, because she did it intentionally, for the express purpose of triggering an all-out fight to the death, their favorite pastime. Elliot was much smaller than Sonya and he never won, but he was a no less enthusiastic participant, as he sincerely believed that, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, he could defeat his sister in hand-to-hand combat. (And, admittedly, Sonya’s always intractably tangled, waist-length tresses gave Elliot a meaningful advantage in hand-to-hair combat).
During the six or seven months I held the job, I had frequent stress dreams in which I despaired over the impossibility of finishing the laundry and dishes, cooking dinner, and tidying what always appeared to be the aftermath of a small tornado, all while trying to prevent Elliot and Sonya from inflicting critical damage on one another. And to add insult to (sometimes literal) injury, I was paid below minimum wage and at intervals most charitably described as “sporadic.” Meanwhile, business was booming at the restaurant, and nights became later and later. During my last couple of months, I worked from 4 p.m. to 2 or 3 a.m., Wednesday through Saturday—a 40+ hour week. My social life, class attendance, and mental health were at an all-time low, and though I tried repeatedly to quit, each time I found myself cajoled into submission. Finally, after one particularly brutal day, Elliot and Sonya’s parents came home at 4 a.m. and, in a flash of bravery, I quit on the spot; immediately afterward, in a flash of guilt and cowardice, I insisted that they keep the nearly $2,000 they by then owed me.
In my next job, I served as a research assistant to the once-famous, now-infamous philosopher John Searle,** who was notorious for never having hired a male research assistant in his over 55 years at UC Berkeley. Indeed, Searle seemed to have a penchant for fair, light-haired women who favored the kinds of makeup and sunhats one might see at a horserace in 1950s Georgia—women like his other RA, Natalie,* and his right-hand woman, Jennifer,** director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology, both loyal to the point of fanaticism.
I wasn’t sure why Searle had hired me, an Asian woman who liked to show up to work in overall shorts and Birkenstocks, but Natalie eventually explained to me that while Searle did tend to hire for looks, in my case, he made an exception and hired for brains instead. Nevertheless, Searle had an odd tendency to do things like interject “—and may he rot in hell!” every time I referenced my then-boyfriend, Zac, or, when I called in sick one day, hope aloud that my condition would deteriorate to the point that I would require mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Periodically, he liked to bring up, seemingly out of the blue, his indignation at previous accusations of sexual harassment leveled against him (“I mean, can you imagine? Me?! And what could they even do about it, anyway? I’m famous!”). Searle, who had just turned 83, would then go on to clarify that his true problem was being the object of so many women’s lust.
This position turned out, to my great surprise, to be not entirely unjustified: Though she never seemed to do any work, Natalie, for one, liked to make regular visits to Searle’s office for the sole purpose of rubbing his thigh while they gossiped. And another young woman in my class, Camilla*—who, like Natalie and Jennifer, favored winged eyeliner, red lipstick, full skirts, and ludicrously large sunhats—sent Searle several undeniably flirtatious emails during my short tenure. In one, she requested that he take her to coffee so that they could “get to know one another more intimately”; in another, she conspicuously mentioned that she had a blog about her struggle with type 1 diabetes. When I helped Searle, entirely computer-illiterate, navigate to the blog, it turned out to consist largely of sexy pictures of Camilla in frilly lingerie; thereafter, assisting Searle in perusing Camilla’s blog became a regular task of mine.
At some point, I realized I had a duty to tell someone about this behavior—which, contrary to all inclination, I did. I was promptly told that since “none of it amounted to sexual harassment,” there was nothing to be done about it, other than quit—and, after all, a lot of people would kill for the Searle job. This became a moot point when, with Searle’s seemingly sympathetic permission, I took a week off work to accompany my mother on a yoga retreat, which my father, having suddenly and unexpectedly died the week before, was unable to attend. When I returned, Camilla was sitting in my desk chair, and I was out another job. (The next research assistant Searle hired, another young Asian woman, later sued him, alleging that he locked her in his office, groped her, and told her they were “going to be lovers.”)
As it turns out, speaking up for yourself is not only supremely unpleasant, but also utterly futile. And honestly, to me, this comes as a great relief—never again will I feel pressured to live a bolder Enneagram Type’s truth, to bear the unbearable burden of asserting that I am a person with interests that matter. Like a true Peacemaker, I have made peace with the fact that my RHETI test was spot on: I am, for better or (more often) for worse, a total fucking pushover.
*Names changed for privacy.
**Name not changed for publicity.
