Muppet Typology
And other ways we find comfort in the mess
The queers ask me about astrology. The boss babes ask me about human design and Meyers-Briggs and enneagram. The 2000’s tweens ask me about my Hogwarts house and then immediately disavow TERFs by saying something like “but anyways, JK Rowling so dead to me, who is she even?”
We’re all looking for ourselves in the assessments of the other, all looking for our reflections in the mirror of the world.
Models for understanding who we are and why we are how we are have existed since the beginning of time. Which means none of us have been able to fully understand exactly why we’re wired so uniquely with behavioral, mental, and emotional patterns that make us feel categorizable.
It’s at the core of so much of our living, learning, and growing, isn’t it? Who am I? What are my strengths? In what scenarios and situations do I thrive? What am I hardwired to truly understand or how am I coded for predictable disregulation?
What makes me, me?
While many of us pay therapists a large portion of our paychecks to get to the bottom of all of these questions, psychologists, astrologers, and philosophers have been reading through story after story of how humans operate and feel and understand for all of time. And there seem to be “types” of us that allow for more alikeness than difference.
Typing ourselves can be as useful as it is comical. Questioning if the grouping we fall into really “fits” us or feeling overwhelmed with vulnerability and exposure by how “seen” we feel.
On Friday I showed up to a meeting I wasn’t particularly looking forward to. I was predicting some tension and disagreement. But what I hadn’t accounted for was the opportunity for inspiration and surprise of a kind of typology completely new to me: Muppet Typology.
First of all, if you know me, you know that I really do love Muppets. My partner and friends and I have taken the “which Muppet are you” Buzzfeed quiz, we love watching old Muppet films (A Muppet Family Christmas is the only Christmas movie we need, IMO), we are frequent users of Elmo and Animal GIFs when texting… you get it. Muppets are iconic and underrated.
So when my colleague and dear friend entered this meeting on Friday with “I’m bringing Chaos Muppet energy,” it just made sense to me. I thought it was a funny and rather poetic way to type oneself. What I wasn’t expecting was a follow up to that comment in the chat of a 2012 article in Slate.
Down the rabbit hole I went. The article offered that there are two kinds of people and two kinds of people only: Chaos Muppets and Order Muppets.
While there are certainly Muppets that are caricatures of each archetype (ie Animal and Kermit), the breakdown is a little more nuanced than that. Chaos Muppets lead with emotion, Order Muppets with logic, and that in each successful relationship there is one of each.
This simplification into two types reminded me of “are you an introvert or an extrovert.” A Muppet binary, if you will (and we all know how binaries fall on everyone’s “NOT” column in “HOT OR NOT”). Sure, it wasn’t perfect and sure, I wasn’t at either end of these binaries, but it reminded me just how much we look for order in the chaos. Always. How much we look to make sense of things as nonsensical as… well… Muppets.
When we seek solutions to things that don’t inherently have problems, when we seek to understand beings who are so constantly in flux and undergoing so much change, are we limiting them? Are we working to shove too much into too few boxes?
Recently, I’ve been talking with people I love about the fallacy of Good and Bad. That things (people especially) can be all good or all bad. And how much we miss out on when we cling to the comfort of the edge of a binary and don’t make space for each others’ grey. The parts that don’t fit into the clear boxes.
It can be so easy to judge ourselves or each other through Good and Bad. It’s our innate desire to simplify a whole-ass-person into something that feels digestible. Understandable.
But what if we’re all both? What if we’re all yes? What if we’re just inner children in adult meat suits doing the best we can with the information we have and then seeking more information but getting distracted by memory and fear and insecurity and shame?
What if our curiosity gives us the ability to dig deeper than categorization and into deeper parts of us that offer connection and understanding: all the times that made us feel us. Whole. Held. Alive. And all the times that we felt that self-autonomy and knowing taken away.
This is not me writing off any form of typology. I find comfort in allegories of self and of the universe regularly. This is merely me, in real-time, wondering what’s ticking beneath it all.
Signed,
A Capricorn, ENFP (sometimes ENFJ), Profile 2/4, Enneagram Type 4, Muppet Somewhere In The Middle
Moving, reading, and writing have been challenging to mentally access the last couple weeks. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the cold, talking to friends, tending to my heart, and making cute crafts like a felt penant flag that says “Go Shrimp!”
I reached a milestone in the book process; on Friday I submitted my book proposal to my agent for final review and from here we send it to potential publishers or “go on submission” to see if anyone wants to bite and take on the project with us. It’s big overwhelming and makes me feel like my tendy soul parts are on display.
Here’s to whatever comes from this long a’worked on love letter to finding our way, even through the fire.
Sending so much care to you all as we sit in this cold, cold, winter.