Muppet Typology and a Note on Self-Discovery (BftP)

February 28, 2019 Beth Wesche

***This is a BftP, or “blast from the past,” post. Prepare yourself for some either relevant or cringe-worthy words from my younger self.

You learn something about yourself every day, right? Apparently, I’m learning that I should have watched a lot more of the Muppets.

It would be an article on the Muppets that peeled back a new layer of self-reflection.

Dahlia Lithwick’s irrever ent take on human typology recently reminded me of a theory I’ve held for awhile now — the idea that much of our lives are a process of forgetting core truths about ourselves, and finding that we must discover them in new ways in order to grow. Case in point: after discussing Muppet Typology with a friend in the midst of a move, I realized two important things. First was that I have a deep-seated thread of doubt about whether my own strengths are actually virtues, or just disasters waiting to happen. Second was that my eighteen-year-old self somehow anticipated this crisis of confidence and wrote me a pep talk on the value of chaos. Talk about déjà vu.

In case you’re wondering, based on Lithwick’s typology, I am without a doubt a Chaos Muppet. That said, I’m often mistyped as an Order Muppet. Some of this is due to my upbringing — I’m the sole Chaos Muppet in a close-knit family of Order Muppets, so I know how to camouflage. Some is personality — I like subtlety, and things that look like one thing until you get closer and realize they’re something else entirely. But peel back a layer or two and it won’t take you long to discover that the surface order is a decoy.

While I embrace my Chaos Muppet identity, I’ve started to realize that I also suffer from a deep-seated streak of self-consciousness around it. Basically, I’m afraid that I’m really just a pile of gas-soaked kindling one unlucky match-strike away from setting the whole house on fire, and people are just too nice to tell me. (Or they’re conned by the Order Muppet exterior. Silly them — you can always tell by the eyes.)

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This realization smarted a bit. I am a strong, confident woman. But at the same time… that dumpster fire idea is really hard to shake. But let’s go back to Muppet Typology for a moment.

See: how I feel, most of the time.

As Lithwick stresses, no one type is better than the other. They’re complements, and the right balance of each type is essential for any system to thrive. Too much chaos, and nothing gets done. Too much order, and no one gets a cookie.

There’s a lot of truth to this. As a Chaos Muppet, I’m drawn to Order Muppets because I see in them the things I lack: consistency, discipline, steadiness, the ability to think before they speak, and a tendency to return their library books on time. The Order Muppets in my life keep me grounded, and — once trust is established — feel like a safe harbor where I can put down my anchor and be stable too, even when the rest of my life is a storm. But you could just as easily characterize Order Muppets by their faults — inflexible, overly risk-averse, resistant to change, maybe even a bit stodgy. Similarly, what I see as the dumpster fires of my own failings — distractability, inconsistency, high-speed bursts of energy that may or may not go anywhere, and an alarming lack of self-preservation — can just as easily be flipped into attributes that don’t sound all that bad: creativity. A proclivity for exploring the unknown, and for seeing connections between things that may not seem intuitive at first. A willingness to act even if I don’t always know the answer, and to trust myself to adapt to new information as it comes in.

These are not terrible traits to have. Particularly when tempered and complemented by an Order Muppet or two, they can actually be rather formidable. There’s power in being able to transform, to change, to swing from the rafters and shake things up. Don’t run from it. Embrace it.

Words from my younger selF:

Pennies on the Track I am a woman divided. This does not mean that I am in running conflict with myself (although such events are not unheard of), but rather that I do a lot of things, yet still find myself scrounging around for a few more minutes to devote to some additional new, exciting (and probably time-consuming) passion. Normally, I get by without too much trouble; I’ve been juggling a life of happy insanity since I was six years old and devoting myself to competitive gymnastics. I’ve gotten to the point at which the constant balancing act is second nature — the gears of habitual chaos are well-oiled, and I chug smoothly through my days. Luckily, my mental powers of organization bear no resemblance to the natural disaster area I call my room, and the fact that I can be impossibly pig-headed when I get my mind set on something generally combines with everything else to help me spin through life in an only slightly pell-mell fashion. Even the occasional blip — finding I’ve committed to being in three places at once, or forgetting some minor detail that throws my carefully balanced schedule into disarray — generally avoids derailing me entirely. I fully admit that my system is not perfect. Without fail, once or twice every year the precisely-crafted machine I call my routine, shall we say …goes to hell. I don’t know what or where the tripwire is. Obviously not, since I do a spectacular swan-dive-into-face-plant every time it strikes. Like a penny on the train tracks, some crucial little detail creeps onto the scene and causes mass chaos completely disproportionate to its size, and I find myself soaring off the edge of a cliff. The critics turn to each other triumphantly and chalk my demise down to a lack of “proper order.” But I disagree. You see, the problem with order — and with trying to do everything at once — is that order is too often equated with a sort of static tidiness. That tidiness, to me, always brings to mind neatly aligned books on a shelf, or schoolchildren standing in a row in carefully pressed blouses — monotony at its finest. And I’ve always thought that that must look an awful lot like dominoes to Fate, and Fate’s cousin Entropy can’t help reaching out a finger and ever-so-slightly tipping the leading piece until the whole precarious order pitches into disaster. But if you change the pattern — if you break that careful “order” by just a hair — then the first book falls alone, leaving the others still standing. Deviate from the line just a bit, and only one child trips, to be caught by her peers. So while I don’t know exactly what triggers the fall, I suspect that every so often, I creep a little too close to that misguidedly-coveted thing called tidiness, and need a quick jolt of stress and harried scrambling to get my mind back on track. Back out of alignment, that is. Because chaos is one of those things like water, or many chemical compounds: too much can kill you, but so can not enough. I find that the closer I get towards tidiness, the further I fall from effectiveness. I like my organized chaos. I get so much more done this way. So while most people may cringe at the idea of things getting a little out of whack, I cringe at the idea things getting overly aligned. After all, one man’s cheer is another man’s despair; we all have our pennies on the track. I find, though, that I prefer an oddly-shaped penny on a rather crooked track.

April 2008