Your Shimmer is Showing (Let it!)

I want to start with a confession. It’s about what happens when you discover that the thing you’d been calling your personality was actually your survival story — wearing your face.

For most of my adult life, I’d have told you I was a Heart-center. The helper. The one who loves through service, who reads the need before you say it, who is endlessly, always available. And I was those things. I just didn’t realize I’d learned to be them — not because they were the truest me, but because they kept me safe.

When I first took the Enneagram, I came back a Two. Of course I did. I answered every question the way the woman I’d trained to be would answer. It wasn’t until a month later — after a lot of honest, somewhat uncomfortable digging and reflection — that I took it again, slowly this time, pausing at every automatic answer to ask: is this true, or is this automatic? And I came back a Seven. Joy. The gift I’d spent two decades quietly praying away for being “too much.”

Here’s where we’re going:

· Why the thing you keep “working on” might not be a flaw at all — it might be the costume.

· The quiet way the good-girl code turns the fruit of the Spirit into a job description for disappearing.

· Your Sacred Shimmer — the God-given gift each Enneagram style was built to carry (and a free guide to find yours).

There are a lot of ways a woman disappears without ever leaving the room. I named it Good Girl Ghosting™ , because good women don’t set out to vanish; we’re taught it’s kindness, maturity, humility, and faithfulness. So it becomes the sneaky should — shrinking mistaken for kindness, silence confused for maturity, self-abandonment misread as faithfulness — lulling us along on autopilot until we wake up one day, look around, and realize we’re 93.8% unrecognizable in our own life.

Underneath it is a mechanism I call the good-girl code, and the disguise it hands you: the costume. The survival story you learned to wear like a personality.

And here’s what I’ve found, after sitting with over a hundred women: the good Christian woman’s biggest struggle isn’t hiding her darkness. It’s hiding her light. The thing we most often bury isn’t our worst — it’s our best. Our boldness, or our steady calm. Our big laugh, our depth, our holy anger, our wide-open wonder. The gift built into us to shine? That’s the thing we learned to tuck away, dim, and even apologize for.

I call that Shadowlight. And to be clear: the shadow isn’t the bad you. It’s the costume you put on to survive — and it worked. It kept you safe once. It just doesn’t get to drive anymore. The light underneath? That’s your Sacred Shimmer, the God-given gift the costume’s been hiding the whole time.

The fruit of the Spirit’s not a coconut

When a spiritual director first named my gift — joy — it hit me like a ton of bricks, because I’d spent twenty years praying it away. I mean… the fruit of the Spirit’s not a coconut. If you’ve hung around in preschool worship circles for any length of time, you know the song. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control-l-l… it’s right there. Joy. My sacred superpower. And I kept blanking on it.

And you know what’s not on that list? Opinion-less. Emotion-less. Needless. It’s tempting to think they are, because they almost sound holy. But that’s exactly where the code gets sneaky — it takes real, biblical virtues and quietly distorts them:

· Gentleness becomes don’t make anyone uncomfortable.

· Kindness becomes don’t disappoint anyone.

· Faithfulness becomes always say yes.

The fruit is biblical. The distortion isn’t. Swallowing every hard feeling isn’t gentleness — it’s suppression. Saying yes when your whole body is screaming no isn’t kindness — it’s self-abandonment. Making yourself smaller so everyone else stays comfortable isn’t humility — it’s shrinking.

God never asked you to disappear.

The gift was never the problem. The costume was.

Nine Gifts, Nine Facets of God

Here’s my Shadowlight framework.

There are nine Enneagram styles, and each one carries a different gift — some a fruit of the Spirit, some a name or attribute of God — but every single one is a different facet of His character.

No one woman carries them all at full strength, and that was never a flaw. That’s the whole design: the Body of Christ reflecting Him together, each of us shining a different piece.

So here’s yours — one for each style:

Type 8 — God is strong. Your shimmer: protective strength — the courage that makes the vulnerable feel safe.

Type 9 — God is peace. Your shimmer: a steady serenity — the calm everyone else borrows.

Type 1 — God is righteous. Your shimmer: integrity that blooms into grace.

Type 2 — God is love. Your shimmer: a generous love finally big enough to include yourself.

Type 3 — God is hope. Your shimmer: hope made visible — you make possibility real enough that a whole room believes it.

Type 4 — God is creative. Your shimmer: sacred depth — the soul who finds beauty where others look away.

Type 5 — God is wise. Your shimmer: clear-eyed wisdom — the clearest eyes in the room.

Type 6 — God is faithful. Your shimmer: vigilant loyalty — a watchfulness that guards the ones who’d never see it coming.

Type 7 — God is joy (this one’s mine). Your shimmer: childlike wonder — the one who remembers there’s still good.

Every one of those gifts has a costume it’s been hiding under — and a sentence you were never told. I made you a free one-page guide with all nine: your gift, the costume, and that sentence. It’s yours here.

If you want the tools to actually lift the costume — not just name it — that’s what waits below, and in the room where we practice it together.

I want to find my shimmer —>