how do you know anything?

Image is my own

When I was 21, at uni overseas, I lived with two roommates in a tall, skinny, stone house that shared a party wall with the tall, skinny, stone house beside us. The three of us, for the most part amicably, shared a room with a bunk bed, a single bed, a tall bureau, and one window that overlooked a green square of park. Across that green, someone in another stone building would play the cello in the evenings. At specific hours, there was the sound of bells. At all hours, there was the sound of sirens.

I adored that house, those roommates. This is not to say we were the same. My roommates and I were all studying, but we spent our time differently. One roommate ran all the time and loved kooky vintage t-shirts. The other tended to her dreadlocks with such steady care that the memory of the soft buzz of her strands knotting together still makes me feel at ease when I think about it. Both my roommates lovingly stepped over the dishes I left on the floor all the time, making me the roommate to be tolerated, and the lucky one.

As for me and my time, I spent most of it hunched over my computer — writing papers or a blog for my friends and family back in Canada. I have photographs of me, perched on the single bed, elbows propped against the mattress, spine a veritable cashew, hair piled in a knot on top of my skull, grinning — oblivious to the neck and shoulder pain this particular posture would later guarantee.

It was amid this gloriously oblivious time that I found the Enneagram. It’s a bit more mainstream now, but in 2010/2011, it was still just a little corner of the Internet. Yet another personality test. And since taking personality tests IS essentially my entire personality, I was intrigued.

I made my way through the long version of the test, wending my way to a set of numbers at the end. One was the primary personality number, I understood, and the other was something called a ‘wing.’

Part of what made that time at uni so wonderful was the distinct sense of time expanding. In every direction, time felt like a rich possibility. This allowed me to go down all-night investigations of things like the Enneagram — an education within my formal education.

There’s a lot I could say about the Enneagram (possibly too much. Just ask anyone who’s ever been the recipient of one of my multi-hour Enneagram downloads). But one of the first most revealing revelations it gave me at 21 was clarity on how I know things.

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The Enneagram teaches that there are three “Centers” of intelligence: the Gut (Types 8, 9, 1), the Heart (Types 2, 3, 4), and the Head (Types 5, 6, 7). While each Center encompasses more than just decision-making—motivating emotions, reactive tendencies—what struck me most was realizing (in the mirror of the Enneagram) thatI’ve always tended to make decisions (particularly major ones) through a gut feeling, a sense of ‘this feels like the choice for me.’ This doesn’t mean I don’t research or ask others for their opinions—I do—but those factors are not the deciding factors for me ultimately.

Until I began to learn about the Centers (I, as I am sure it is becoming obvious, am a Gut center), I hadn’t understood that this kind of internal knowing was not universal. Not everyone, I began to realize, could access an internal sense of direction or instinct. Not everyone made their decisions through an embodied sense of direction.

Take my partner J. He’s a Heart Center. When he asks for my help deciding between, let’s say, A or B, I’ll say: okay, but first, how do you feel about A versus B? And inevitably he will answer by telling me about how A will affect Relationship 1 and/or Relationship 2, and/or how the ripple effects will affect a system of relationships all directly and often also tangentially related to Option A and B.

Even now, knowing that he’s a Heart Center, sometimes still, I’ll listen to him talk and enter a distinct sense of bafflement: Why are we talking about relationships when I asked how you feel? Why do these relationships matter when I’m asking about what you think you should do?

This is the thing about Heart Centers: the relationships are how Heart Centers know what to do. J knows things relationally. His sense of what’s the path for him is mediated through connection. So when I ask how he feels, he translates that into: what are the relational consequences of this decision?

And when I push further—no, but what do you feel?—he’ll shake his head. He doesn’t know. He might have flickers of feeling but nothing concrete, nothing that feels reliable.

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For further contrast, a close friend is a Head Center. When they’re faced with a decision, they’ll start a detailed review: data, evidence, more data. It’s familiar to me, this research deep-dive. But the difference between them and me is that for them the data is the authority. It is what they look to to guide where they go next. For me, the research is a point of reference, not the point of reference—for me, that is generally how I feel, the gut instinct.

Of course, like anything, we all access all three Centers. But depending on your Enneagram type, one Center tends to lead. And when you know which one leads for you, it’s a strangely clarifying understanding. It gave me a way of mapping myself, especially when I was feeling unsure or stuck.

For me, the work since 21 has been learning to differentiate between gut instinct and anxiety: a difference that still often only becomes obvious to me with hindsight.

But this framework—this knowing where your Knowing begins—has consistently helped me navigate moments that I’ve felt trapped in, without any idea of where to go next. It’s helped me return, again and again, to the truth that even when I don’t know how I feel, I know where to start looking.

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