Enneagram sp8: an appetite braced for a siege

Cash is the thing. An sp8 keeps enough of it at home to last a good while, in a fireproof box in the closet with one key. Money in the bank never feels entirely theirs, since a bank can freeze it. Self-preservation tends body and household in anyone; in an Eight, whose fear is ending up in someone else's power, it tends the question of who holds the purse strings, and the box is the answer.

At the checkout of a home improvement store the card gets declined: a fraud alert, the account frozen until they call in. There's a line behind them. Of all losses this is the loudest one for an sp8, though not a dollar is gone. They don't wait on hold. They pay cash from the wallet, and by evening they've opened an account at a credit union and moved part of the money, so one hand never holds all of it again.

The brother-in-law gets an envelope right at a kid's birthday party: the loan repaid ahead of schedule, out of the first money in a month when contracts hardly came in. The rest of the month will be lean, and that barely registers with an sp8. For an Eight, owing means somebody has the right to bring it up, and that right is the first thing they buy back, before anything else gets a thought.

An sp8 buys beef by the side, straight from a farm, and cut and wrapped it fills a chest freezer in the basement. That is how an Eight's lust, for which nothing is ever quite enough, works under self-preservation: its measure moves off volume and arguments and onto food, heat and stock. Need has little to do with it. A full freezer feels like being fed in advance, and that feeling is worth more to them than any object money buys.

An ordinary week of work and dinners gets provisioned as if the stores would close tomorrow, the banks lock up and the neighbors stop answering the door, all in one night. They don't expect a disaster and don't talk about one. Hence survival: lust, bored by ordinary amounts, has found the one yardstick it measures stock by, getting through alone, with nobody's help, for as long as it takes.

At the lake cabin the sp8 ladles water on the sauna rocks while the others drift out one by one, and sits on the top bench until the heat is what they want, then a little past it. From there they walk straight into the October lake. Rest has no medium setting for them any more than stocking up does: the body gets everything at once, to the edge. At dinner afterward they eat more than anyone and sleep as if after a double shift.