Celebrating my gravitation towards Type B people and ways of being | #25
Shifting into a long-term mode of contentment, consistency and vitality
Welcome to 73(!!) new readers of my wee newsletter. In a recent shift towards contentment with my writing ritual, I found myself excitedly asking a wider circle of friends if they wanted to read my newsletter — thanks for saying ‘yes’ ❤️. This newsletter is about that shift.
I am writing from Glasgow, where as a family, we’ve been road-tripping from London to Edinburgh, into the Scottish highlands (Inveraray, Oban, Fort William, Glen Coe, Perth) before heading back down to London via Glasgow and Manchester. Here are some pics:
Type A girl
For most of my life, you could spot the Type A-ness of my world and everything in it from a mile away.
Since the middle of last year, I have started gravitating towards Type B people and ways of being. Looking back, I realise this has been years in the making and a cause for celebration. While not every Type A person has inner work they need to do, my Type A-ness arose out of a desperate need for validation, and a deeply seated belief that unless I was of some value in some sort of achievement sense, I was not worthy of being.
Type A friends might resonate with the achievement-oriented, competitive, fast paced and impatient aspects of my personality. And perhaps also some of the challenges that come with it such as a tendency towards overworking and struggling to relax. While I am not sure I will ever lose all these aspects of myself, I can see that I have started gravitating towards Type B energy. With that shift, I see myself enjoying the journey more as well as am attaching less urgency and stress to outcomes. These are traits typical of a Type B personality.
The couple who learnt how to ‘become nobody’
Up until this point, most of my friends have been in demanding, high-paid jobs, and I was always attracted to people chasing something in their lives. They pushed themselves, wanted more, and tended to be unsatisfied or have a really high bar for friendships, relationships, jobs and even fitness. Many of us struggled with self-acceptance, self-love and/or even self-compassion.
In August last year, I met a couple on the train to a meditation retreat we were all attending. When I first saw them on the train, they were two happy and very young looking people enjoying their matcha bubble tea. My initial reaction was that they were probably carefree and jolly students. It turns out the woman is my age, and in an incredibly well paid finance job and her partner is older than both of us.
The reason my initial impression of them was so far from the truth was that they were emitting very Type B personality traits. Contentment with their bubble tea, friendly smiles and a sense of calm and grounded-ness in themselves. The finance world that going to business school had accustomed me to and the corporate world that I’d worked in did not have the energy that these two were sending out.
I guess when I met Syl and Tesh, I’d reached a point of self-contentment and was seeking less of the hungry, ambitious energy and more of the grounded and stable friendships. Syl had previously identified with being Type A herself, but now she doesn’t anymore either.
At their house for dinner later in our friendship, I shared that they were not the typical type of friends I’d made in my life. And just under a year or so before meeting them, I’d likely have overlooked being friends with them. They were curious as to why. I said they were too content, too grounded, and not chaotic or self-sabotage enough to have attracted me in the very recent past. They found it amusing but didn’t think much of it.
These two became very close friends of mine over the last year as we attended multiple raves and day festivals together, ate at each other’s houses countless times and longboarded together across London.
What I love about my friendship with them is that it is still marked by all the things I enjoy but rather than rushing into those things, it feels like we are working on them incrementally over a longer horizon. For example, Syl and I go to the same yoga class and she’s been working patiently on her handstands and is now at a point where she is able to hold a freestanding handstands for a few seconds. She hasn’t been urgent and impatient to get there, she’s just been doing her bit consistently and patiently.
Their practices across kirtan, raving, yoga, longboarding and snowboarding are incremental, stable, consistent and done with a long-term mind. I love how they practise and engage with the things they love, and have been starting to embrace a similar mindset myself.
The term ‘Becoming Nobody’ comes from spiritual teacher, Ram Dass’, documentary and audiobook about living a meaningful life.
A healthy relationship to improvement
Lately, and I believe this has something to do with my gravitation towards Type B people, I’ve been shown a different way to relate to improvement. One particular conversation on this came up in a discussion about chess with Vinnie, a burner I wrote about in my previous newsletter. We’d played a few games with each other when he mentioned there were some good lessons in a chess app we were using. He also suggested working on the puzzles the app gave. He said both helped him improve a lot.
As someone who’s struggled with self-love and hungrily self-improved to make up for that, I am always wary about the desire for improvement. I don’t think the desire for improvement is categorically bad especially in moderation but I’d always been around people who had an all-or-nothing relationship with improvement. I’d been that way quite a lot of my life too. Self-improvement at one point became a never-ending act associated with my value.
I told him that the interesting thing about my relationship with chess was that I don’t really feel particularly motivated to do things outside of the game to improve my chess. I’d been surprised by that revelation when I have that mentality towards pretty much everything else I do. I would occasionally do handstands or difficult yoga asanas at home to improve them as well as drawing and painting. With chess, I love the game and being in it but I shared that I don’t really mind not being good at it.
I found his response to be a really healthy relationship to the notion of improvement: “But it’s possible to be happy at the level you’re at with something but then still try to improve. Not even because you think being better will make you happier but the process of learning itself is something you enjoy.”
Shifting ways of being and falling in love with process
I used to look at my profile on the social media site, X, and obsess over increasing the follower count. I couldn’t enjoy the day-to-day of making interesting Internet friends as well as sharing and learning from each other on X. I felt this way with my yoga practice also, fixated on how I could just keep being better than before.
Even the people I surrounded myself with were ones who would grind for the outcome rather than enjoy the journey and the process. And, I, myself, had also been someone who grinded particularly hard for the outcome, not knowing how to have self-compassion and enjoy the journey.
The ‘never-enough’ feeling used to have a powerful hold over me but this had started shifting. The accumulation of work I’d been doing in therapy since 2019, writing and uncovering truths about myself in community and through this newsletter, somatic and energetic work with shamanic healer Lynn, and the willingness to face the depths of uncomfortable truths like how I had been seeking fame and the significance of my insignificance were all part of birthing this shift.
An example of my shift towards being more Type B is my relationship to my bi-monthly newsletter. I’ve kept up a cadence of writing this newsletter at least every two weeks, sometimes even more, all year. I am so proud of this because it came from no longer worrying about the subscriber count or fame. I had fallen in love with the process of writing and sharing my thoughts. It became a sufficient enough act in and of itself that I look forward to spending hours on it each week, never mind whatever happened after.
It feels lovely to have a ritual for which I hold myself accountable. The type where if I don’t do it, there is no consequence and no external carrot or stick. It feels like the nice type of intrinsic motivation people talk about when they find flow in doing something they love for a very long sustained period of time.
Similarly, my yoga, kirtan, ecstatic dance and sauna/cold plunge practices have morphed from an extreme relationship to improvement of proving my worth into a lifelong practice of wellbeing, being grounded in myself and ways of living that are good for me. I have started to fall in love with the process of each of these practices not because being better at them will make me happier but because engaging with them gives me joy.
Sure, being Type A might enable me to achieve more and be more successful by societal definition, but I feel a sense of grounded-ness, centred-ness and solidity in peeling away my Type A-ness and shifting towards being more Type B. Ultimately I feel that being Type B and knowing how to get into flow states is going to give me a happier, healthier and more sustained lifestyle.
Love and light to you,
Caryn