The Helpers are All Helped Out
“What number are you?”
What number was I? I resisted the urge to say, “Number one baby. Number one for life,” then kiss my index finger and send it up to the sky.
It turns out she was talking about a test called the Enneagram that qualifies personalities as numbers. I took the test; I love finding out what I “am,” even if I’m suspicious of the reasons that a person would ask such a question.
Whenever someone asks me about what category I am, whether it’s my astrological sign (Gemini), my Chinese Zodiac animal (rat), my Myers-Briggs profile (ENFJ), or birth order (middle child, obviously), I always suspect that it’s code for, “Yikes, so you’re a lot, you know that, right?”
The Enneagram test was a series of 144 paired statements. You’re supposed to select the statement that feels truest. For example:
I have been comfortable making decisions quickly.
I have struggled to make decisions quickly.
Do I make decisions quickly or not? Quickly. Quickly, right?
I noticed that I wanted to answer aspirationally, rather than realistically. What do I do on my best day? Make decisions quickly.
Best version of Bad Bitch Katie makes decisions in the amount of time it takes her to do a shot of tequila, shoot Nicolas Cage pistol fingers into the sky, and say, “Let’s roll!” Ride or die, Bad Bitch Katie!
Buuuuut last night you stood in front of an open refrigerator door for six minutes because you couldn’t decide between tacos and pasta.
Oh, hello, Regular Katie. Thanks for reminding me that Bad Bitch Katie has a softer side. She buys perfume-free biodegradeable detergent, learns about the advantages of nut-based alternative milks, and last night she found herself stunned to inaction by conflicting desires for both tortellini and avocado.
Bad Bitch Katie drinks deeply from the cup of life!!!
Regular Katie has just a couple of quick follow-up questions tho: are we thinking iced lemongrass tea or sparkling water with lime? Or are we just gonna go for it and pop some chardonnay? Girls? What are we thinking? For the cup of life? Should we do a SurveyMonkey?
Do I struggle to make decisions quickly, or not? I mulled over that question about my decisiveness. For long enough that we all knew the answer. I think that, when quizzing a person on a quality such as decisiveness, there should be an 8-second cutoff after which the page refreshes, a pop-up window appears, and it reads, “Yeah, no. We got it. We know who you are.”
I found the next question about how I approach conflict similarly agonizing to answer. I avoid conflict with relatives and will slip from the room with a vacant smile on my face when I get uncomfortable; I flat-out refuse to budge on IP during contract negotiations. Yes, I have withdrawn from conflict. Yes, I have invited conflict. But which one is really me?
144 questions later, I got my results.
Hello, my name is Katie, and I am a number… 2. I am The Helper. Empathetic, altruistic, thoughtful toward others, generous, nurturing, and given to genuine self-sacrifice.
Well, that was anticlimactic.
A Helper! You don’t say! Let’s just check that against my C.V.
I’m a full-time caregiver to two young sons. I’m a classroom volunteer and a food bank volunteer and a philanthropic organization board member.
When I go to the beach, I bring trash bags to pick up litter.
When I go to Costco, I email my sons’ teachers to see if they need anything.
I structure my day around other people’s snacks and bowel movements.
And it took you 144 questions to discover that I’m a “Helper”?
You could’ve sat in my kitchen for 3 minutes in the morning and figured that shit out all on your own.
The Helper. I was disappointed but unsurprised. Deep down, I always knew I was a Hufflepuff, even if I dreamed in red and gold, or sometimes even silver and green.
Still, I felt like I blew the test. I’d permitted kinder, gentler Katie to take the test for me, fraudulently, while the bad bitch in my heart jotted down innovative expletives to fling at Douche Ballou, today’s main mansplainer on Twitter.
It’s not that Regular Katie is a lie. She’s just an incomplete iteration, a sketch of a woman, the representative I elected to “be” Katie to teachers, neighbors, and relatives, and according to this $14 test that’s supposed to reveal my truest self, she’s the person whom I selected to answer the questions on my behalf. But as I scrolled down on my results to learn more about the person I supposed I was, an italicized sentence caught my eye:
If you are a woman and your Helper score is highest, look at your next two high scores—women are often taught to play the role of the Helper whether it is their basic type or not.
I looked for an equivalent notice for men.
Perhaps something like, “If you are a man and your Explaining score is highest, look at your next two high scores -- men are often taught that volume is the same thing as expertise and that they are not only welcome but crucial to literally every conversation on Earth, so they peacock around trumpeting out of their asses whether they know what they’re talking about or not.”
Or maybe, “If you are a man and your Handsy score is highest, back the fuck up and get thee to a therapist, whether you think you need it or not.”
Of course, there was no such notice for men.
And that’s when Bad Bitch Katie came out to play. My first instinct was to put on a leather vest and punch a wall or possibly a moose, a full-grown moose, right in its stupid face. (I’m sorry, moose. I’m not really mad at you.)
So, hi, first question: according to these results, men are what they are but women are all Dr. Helpers and Ms. Hydes? I’ll get to the women in a second. (BELIEVE ME, I’ll get to them.) But first, what a grotesque erasure of the way toxic masculinity demands that our boys steer hard away from Helper territory. While the observation about women’s conditioning to sacrifice themselves with a smile on our faces makes me furious, at least the test acknowledges that women have powerful social conditioning to contort ourselves in ways that are painful, unnatural, and make our lives smaller. The same pressure hurts men too and it should be acknowledged.
Now, for the women.
How unfair to saddle only one gender with post-examination work to unmanipulate our personalities. Men get to take the test and learn who they are; women take the test and learn… we took it wrong. How depressing and unsurprising to demand further emotional labor from women, whose failings have just been pointed out to them, again.
How refreshing for the women.
Can we also discuss the fact that the forced, automatic self-sacrifice of women is such a commonly accepted social norm that a freaking content writer at the Enneagram company added it as a helpful tip in a personality quiz result template?
“Fun fact! Your daily experience of blaming yourself for your own oppression is fully internalized at this point, so you’re gonna have to learn how to ignore the dominant voice in your head because that’s the fox in your hen house, baby. Good luck with that! It’s gonna be rough.”
***
Before I go on, I want to be crystal clear: Many inimitable women find deep empowerment in their choice to perform acts of service. If the Venn diagram of Helpers and Women You Think Are Pathetic is a circle, that is a YOU problem, not a helper problem or a women problem.
I’ve written several essays on the value of service work, parenting, community building, nurturing, social maintenance, emotional labor, and other predominantly female endeavors.
This one is not a rebuttal of the value of that work. This one is about women who wonder if they’re broken because they feel disappointed when the Enneagram confirms that they have been sentenced to a life of self-sacrifice.
Many of the women I know have forgotten that we do the daily work of slipping on a mask of helpful other-centeredness over whatever our secret selves actually are: disruptive, critical, selfish, introverted, private. From our earliest socialization, women learn how to focus on sharpening our awareness of opportunities to help others instead of focusing on achieving our own goals.
When I taught at my son’s co-op preschool, I used to spend time every day supervising the playground. One day, a kid got upset about something, maybe someone had taken the balance bike that he wanted to ride, and someone, I don’t remember which grown-up, asked one of the little girls to go help that kid feel better.
The little girl, I’ll call her Mandy, stopped building a house out of sticks and leaves. She ran over to the upset kid and helped. She gave him a hug. She calmed him down. It was kind. It was admirable. But also…
Mandy had already learned that it was part of her job to make sure that everyone around her was okay, too. Meanwhile, the fort she’d been building sat unfinished.
Arguably, this little 4-year-old girl was better at helping than the 4-year-old boys might have been, not necessarily because of her personality, but because by 4 years old many little girls have already been complimented on their ability to help and have discovered the pleasure of receiving compliments from adults in their lives.
They’ve already been offered role models who are also Helpers, often their own mothers first and foremost, and been given extra Helper practice at home, on playgrounds, with siblings, and in school, where their successful helping is praised and practiced, again and again. Little girls learn that they can lead the class in helping, and little girls want to be leaders.
From childhood, girls practice awareness of other people’s happiness instead of pursuing our own. And for some of us, our happiness would still genuinely lie in “helping others,” if we had the freedom to choose to do so.
Instead, we come to believe that there’s something wrong with us if we don’t like helping. If you’re a private introvert who finds social contact draining and stressful, or if you’re a combative critic or a self-involved analyst, you learn to gut it out in order to show up and do your best mom impression: helpful, cheerful, and chatty. (Do you ever think about who your mom was aping when she showed up helpful, cheerful, and chatty? If your mom didn’t show up that way, did you think she was a good mom?)
It makes me want to smash someone's hands in a car door, then open the door, slam that shit closed again, and then lean on it, when I think about the mandatory self-sacrifice demanded of only women. We give up some portion of our own needs or wishes in favor of the needs or wishes of others and we barely even notice it anymore.
***
When I let Regular Katie, the loving mother, answer questions about relationships, conflict, and personality, Helper was the only real choice available to her. Nurturing, selfless, other-centered. That’s a mother, or at least a good one. What good is a mother who isn’t a Helper? As a mother, I can be a Helper or a failure, is how it feels.
When I fail as a Helper to my children, I believe I’ve failed them as a mother. When I snap at them because they’ve interrupted my writing, or let them watch another hour of TV so I can finish a piece, and then yell at them for having inconsolable, hopped-up TV- brain temper tantrums when I finally turn off the screen, the lesson could not be clearer: You could have stayed up late to finish your essay. You should have been coloring with them. You deserve this shitty afternoon. You did this to yourself, and worse, you did this to your children, too.
Conversely, when my husband succeeds as a Helper for our children, nurturing them, kissing boo-boos, crouching by their sides in the planter bed to watch them watch roly-polies in the wet dirt, he doesn’t log that work internally as a meaningful contribution to our family. He only feels that he’s contributed when he brings professional success and safety to our table, even as other people who witness even his bare-minimum Helper actions fawn over him. They take pictures of him wearing our sleeping infant in an Ergo while he drinks a beer at the beach. They ask me how I got so lucky. I mean, yeah. But also…
Wearing a sleeping baby does not a superhero make. I don’t need him to be a hero. He’s a great father, and that’s plenty.
I resent the hell out of the way both of our loving parenthood is made invisible, mine because it’s taken for granted until I punish myself for failing at it, and his because his everyday parenting is treated as heroic when it never had to be superhuman to be admirable.
***
The problem is not that we’ve instilled the value of self-sacrifice in young women; the problem is that we’ve failed to instill it in young men, and what we’ve instilled in young women is actually a mutation of self-sacrifice, one that mandates the output of their energy, yet does not guarantee a return on that investment. There are a lot of true 2’s out there, healthy and self-aware Helpers: men, women, both, and neither who find helping, self-sacrifice, and other-centeredness deeply satisfying. They DO get that return on their investment of time and energy.
Genuine selflessness is one reason we see so many powerful women in philanthropy. Get goosebumps when you watch a woman advocate for someone else’s cause, and imagine a world where women can also advocate for themselves with the same clarity and conviction, but without the need to apologize and center another person’s needs in order to justify her presence at the front of the room. Someday.
We teach our girls that helping is what they’re naturally best at; helping is the best way to show love; helping is always enjoyable if you’re a good person; helping is the path to happiness. For some, that’s true. However, for many people, mostly women, self-sacrifice is a necessary task assigned to them by virtue of their sex, not their aptitude or interest. We put in thousands of hours of practice from a very early age and as a result, we get really good at helping, which means that people give us more opportunities to help.
Sometimes I feel like I won a hot dog-eating contest and walked away with a lifetime supply of hot dogs.
Helping is, in many ways, a girl’s native tongue, a practice that leads to proficiency but not necessarily passion. My practiced skill at pausing myself to serve others has given me more opportunities to pause myself to serve others, a skill that I have mastered but don’t particularly enjoy.
I would call self-sacrifice the flossing of sexual politics, except at least when you’re flossing, nobody expects you to be happy about it.
***
But that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that by mandating women’s self-sacrifice, we have counterfeited self-sacrifice.
I often doubt the sincerity of offers of help from girlfriends. I don’t doubt their affection for me or their desire to make my life easier, but I know for a fact that these women do not have time and energy goin’ beggin’.
My girlfriends were not despondent at the spa, wishing for something to do when I mentioned that Buster had the flu. My sister was not fanning herself with a stack of $50 bills when my text came in: “Buster barfed in bed and I’m out of detergent! (screamy face)”
In fact, sometimes I won’t mention that I need popsicles, saltines, or detergent when I tell friends about Buster’s flu, because I know what would happen if I told a woman that I didn’t know how I was going to get to the store today. She would ask what I needed and it would be on my door, plus a bottle of wine and a carton of gelato, within an hour. Amazon robots fucking wish they could work at the speed and efficiency of one of my girlfriends.
When friends do offer to help, I often refuse multiple times, even if I could really use a hand. I know what it’s like when a friend mentions that she’s in the weeds and I can push my workout again to make a quick run to the store for her. I too have leaped without thinking to offer more than I could spare, and had to borrow from my sleep, my work, or my health to give something to someone else.
It is a blessing to be able to help the people I love, but when I am on the needing end, I am keenly aware of how quickly my girlfriends may give more than they can spare to me. I don't want to take my friends' sleep, work, health, or time. I measure my own needs not just in units of my time and labor, but in the value of my friends’ projects that they would have to back-burner in order to help me out. “Are my popsicles more important than her yoga class? No. She loves that class and it really helps her back pain. I’ll go to the grocery store instead of writing tonight after Ryan gets home. That way I can get the granola that I signed up to bring for tomorrow’s Kindergarten yogurt parfait bar.”
My friends’ offers of help create an opportunity for me to help them by refusing their help.
And around and around we go, helping each other automatically, keeping our code. You know the way mobsters never rat? Women help. Women show up.
We show up because we’re good at it. We show up because that’s the best way we know to love you, and we really do love you!
We show up because it makes us happy to make your day better. I love to make a double-batch of brownies when someone has a baby. I feel connected to the people I love when I nurture them with a pan of homemade enchiladas, or run an errand to save them a trip. I AM a 2, a Helper. The test wasn’t wrong. It was just incomplete.
I’ve found that, as a Helper, the things that Bad Bitch Katie loves can take an awfully long time to finish. Then, when my personal passions take me longer than I feel they should, I blame myself for being disorganized and undisciplined, even as, at midnight, I set out the various objects I’ll use to meet the needs of others tomorrow: the granola for the parfait party, Chicken’s reading log, the Dixie cups for Buster’s preschool, the donation to the diaper drive, the book I’m passing on to Meg, the check for the water bill, the letter to my Grandmother. I remind myself that the ability to nurture is a blessing, not a burden.
Although now that I write that, who says it can’t be both?!? It would have been a blessing to give myself permission to do less laundry and finish this fucking essay last week, too.
And that’s the heart of the problem: I have to do post-examination analysis on my own personality in order to try to give myself permission to choose myself, occasionally, with the understanding that there will probably be consequences for it.
Mandatory self-sacrifice is theft, not love.
Because of this fucked-up, largely invisible system of forcing women into imperative selflessness, I trust my loved ones less. The people I love trust me less, too, and they’re right to, and that is the worst fucking part.
But the test wasn’t wrong.
The more I think about it, the more I really just feel like a big old number 2.