Once I realized I was able to make people laugh, I was addicted to it. But I didn’t understand why I was addicted to it. I didn’t understand that I was trying to create joy and love in the world because I lived in a world seriously lacking in joy and love. I didn’t understand that I was flocking to this thing because it gave me an identity and an outlet and the validation that I was so desperately seeking and needing.
• • •
When you’re lost in the depths of depression or spiraling out of control with anxiety, part of what makes you feel so hopeless and lost is the feeling I had in Austin, the sense that you’re all alone and nobody could possibly understand your pain because nobody has ever suffered the way that you are suffering in that moment. But that isn’t true. Not only are people across the world suffering in the same way you’re suffering, people have suffered in the exact same way you’re suffering since the dawn of civilization.
Life on earth today may look nothing like it did thousands of years ago. Mankind’s technological advancements may have remade the planet in ways unimaginable to our ancestors. But the core of what it is to be human has, arguably, remained a constant. We can still look to ancient texts from all manner of different civilizations, and maybe not all of it is up to date, but many of the basic lessons of how our personalities work and how to be a good person and live a meaningful life still apply. It’s merely the setting that’s different. Seen in that context, the struggles we endure today are not some kind of unique torture being visited upon us because of our own failing. Quite the opposite. They’re universal, timeless. The thing that you’re wrestling with? Someone in ancient Sumer was wrestling with that exact same thing five thousand years ago. Which is comforting, or at least it should be, because it means you’re not alone. It also means that, just maybe, somebody’s already figured you out.
As I moved through my time in Connecticut and got over my initial frustrations with vomiting up my story over and over again, I did start to find concrete and tangible help. The life coach I met with was especially helpful. She was much more “You can do this!” and less “Tell me about your father,” which I appreciated. She was the first person who gave me what I felt was an answer, a nugget of truth, an actionable piece of information that helped me understand and reframe my life. We were discussing my career as an actor and my habit of seeking external validation for my sense of self-worth, and to help me understand myself a bit better she gave me a few books, the most important of which were The Wisdom of the Enneagram, by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, and The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, by Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert.
I had heard a bit about the Enneagram prior to my trip to Connecticut, but these books opened my mind to a new and helpful understanding of who I am. The simplest way to describe the Enneagram is as a kind of diagnostic personality test, sort of like if the Myers-Briggs test and the zodiac had a baby. It is both psychological and spiritual. According to these books I was given, it’s this ancient thing whose roots can’t be fully traced because it was handed down through an oral tradition by Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews for thousands of years. It was believed to be so accurate that it was almost like magic, and the people who were enlightened to it didn’t want it in the hands of anyone who would abuse it, so it was kept secret.
The concept, as I’ve come to understand it, is that everyone is born with a unique essence that falls within nine different categories of personality, different archetypes of character. There’s a test that you take. It’s one hundred and forty-four questions where you have to choose from different this-or-that options, such as:
[ ] I have tended to focus too much on myself.
[ ] I have tended to focus too much on others.
Or:
[ ] I have been a bit cynical and skeptical.
[ ] I have been a bit mushy and sentimental.
Or:
[ ] When I’ve had conflict with others, I’ve tended to withdraw.
[ ] When I’ve had conflict with others, I’ve rarely backed down.
You answer all these questions and the test acts like a Harry Potter Sorting Hat, telling you which of the nine categories you belong to.
These categories are not hard and fast. The best way to describe them is to imagine a spectrum of light. You’ve got ultraviolet on one side and infrared on the other, but each hue of light transitions gradually into the next. Red becomes red-orange before it becomes orange. Each of the types has a number and a corresponding name explaining its nature, though the names vary based on which interpretation of the Enneagram you’re looking at. As an example, if you’re a type one, that means you’re “The Reformer.” If you’re a type two, you’re “The Helper.” And just like the red-orange color, you can be different percentages of each, part Reformer and part Helper. According to these authors’ interpretations of the Enneagram, no matter what happens to you in your life, no matter what programming you get, good or bad, none of that changes your identifying essence. You were born with that. You can be different versions of it, you can be healthy or unhealthy, but you don’t become something else.
Each of these archetypes has a primary role to play, a primary gift to bring to the world. Yet each one also has a corresponding challenge to overcome, a deep spiritual need that can only truly be filled or satisfied through becoming your highest self. This gift and this need are intertwined and complementary, two sides of the same coin, the yin and yang of each other. If you are a healthy and healed person, you’re using your gift to make the world a better place. However, if you’re not healthy and not healed, you’re too often wasting that gift, indulging it in yourself in a futile attempt to satisfy this need, which only ends in tragedy. It’s a spiritual dead end that will not only leave you unfulfilled but also leave the world a poorer place for being deprived of your gifts.
Ultimately, society cannot function if we’re not using our gifts for the good of the whole. There’s a reason we are all these different hues of this spectrum. We’re all a part of the same light, but we each serve a different purpose. We’re all interconnected and linked to each other. We balance each other. We need each other. There is no right way to be. Not everyone can be The Reformer; not everyone can be The Helper; we are all complementing one another to make a better world.
My life coach thought it would be helpful for me to understand my story and my personality through the context of the Enneagram, and she was right. It might not be the right diagnostic tool for everyone; there are countless other ways to define and categorize the different types of human personalities. But I found it incredibly helpful, and fascinating.
When you take the Enneagram test, it doesn’t tell you exactly what number you are. It gives you an array of highest probabilities, but it still requires you to do the work to read through all of the chapters and see which one resonates with you. When you read the chapters about the personality types in the Enneagram, you tend to think that you could be several different types, because there’s a great deal of overlap. But then you get to the one chapter that nails you, and you almost feel naked when you’re reading it. It exposes you and all your tricks. That’s how I felt when I sat down and read the chapter on type seven, The Enthusiast. It was like reading my mail, all of my mail: good mail, bad mail, all of it.
Oh God, I thought, this is me.
And it was. The primary role of The Enthusiast is to bring joy. That is their gift to bring to the world. But accompanying that is The Enthusiast’s primary need: their shadow motivation. You see, the desire to bring joy is coupled with the need to avoid pain. That is the true definition of the archetype, and that fit me like a glove. I was drawn to the world of entertainment practically from the womb. As I had grown up with a single mom in Ventura, television was a huge part of my life. It was the babysitter, the constant companion. I probably learned most of what I knew about life—or what I thought life was supposed to be—from watching TV. It was my first exposure to families that were “healthy” or “normal.” We never watched Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best or any of those shows, the ones with the archetypal happy suburban nuclear families. For us it was always TGIF: Full House or Step by Step or Family Matters, and to the extent that those families were a bit more dysfunctional than the Cleavers, they were always dysfunctional in a “Haha, let’s all joke and laugh our way through it” type of way, which probably didn’t help all that much if you really stop to think about it.
I believe God has created all of us to be conduits of love, conduits of light, conduits of life. If we can get through our own traumas and our own pains and injuries and find healing in that, it allows us to become stronger, more efficacious conduits.
I can remember watching HBO with my sisters, and I’m talking about the OG HBO: the logo flying in and the whooshing lights swirling inside the “O” and that big theme song blaring out of the TV, “Da-na-na, na-na, na-na-na-na!” It was the best. We’d sit there, no grown-ups present, and watch whatever was on, anything and everything; I watched The Terminator on HBO when I was like four years old. My parents didn’t know, or didn’t care. They weren’t around. As long as we were occupied and not burning the house down, hey, knock yourself out.
At that age I had no idea what being an actor was, or how a television show was made, but I can remember, very distinctly, at the age of four, becoming cognizant of the idea that I could intentionally make people laugh. I learned that I could mimic people’s voices and personalities, and do weird, silly gags, and it would make people smile. I started learning dumb kid jokes and I would tell them all the time. Once I’d achieved the laugh, I knew that I’d accomplished something. Because a laughing person is a happy person. I had created joy where joy hadn’t existed before, and that felt like a superpower—a superpower that gave me purpose in life.
I was the middle boy between two sisters. It was my mom; my two sisters; my two aunts; my cousin Nikki, who was like our third sister; and my grandma. I was floating in a sea of estrogen. Our family outings were going to JCPenney—or Nordstrom or Macy’s or Marshalls, or all of them—and shopping. As the middle kid and the only boy, I was always fighting to have a voice and identity of my own and constantly creating worlds of my own imagination. The television and the video games I played through the television became the worlds that I lived in and loved. I wanted to emulate them and be a part of them.
When I was around six, I started becoming aware of how the whole mechanism of entertainment worked. That’s a television, and those are actors, and the camera is here, and the set is over there, and so on. That’s when it dawned on me, “Oh, okay, this thing where I create laughter and joy in people, I can do that as a job?” And that was it. Something inside me clicked, and from that point on there was no turning back. I loved people, loved making them happy, and I put all of my eggs in that basket.
When I moved to the Northwest, I spent so much time alone, but it wasn’t really a problem of making new friends. I was actually good at making new friends. Unfortunately, I was also good at losing those new friends because I was too much for people. I was Entertainer Boy. I didn’t know how to shut up. I had no off switch. I was always cuttin’ it up and doing silly voices. I impersonated Urkel on a regular basis. “Did I do that?” I had the Urkel lunch box, my pants pulled up. Family Matters, bro. That was TGIF. That was everything.
I used to go to my sixth-grade teacher and ask if I could get up and do comedy sketches in front of the class, and not for any special occasion or anything; I just did them to do them. One time I did this parody of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” I called it “Welcome to McDonald’s.” I swear to God, I got up in front of a roomful of kids—kids who already teased me and berated me relentlessly—and I sang, “Welcome to McDonald’s, we’ve got fun and games / We’ve got lots of French fries, we’ve got lots of shakes / Oh McDonald’s! Welcome to McDonald’s!” I thought I was a genius. The whole time I was up there I was thinking, This is great. Everybody’s going to love this. Then, when I finished the song, you could basically see a giant, life-sized cricket in the back holding up a big neon sign flashing: “Awkward Silence.” It was horrible, and also surely part of why I ended up with loogies on my backpack.
You’d think I would have learned something from that. I didn’t. I kept doing it. I would do anything and everything that I thought might be funny or would get people to like me. Amazingly, my teachers kept letting me do it too. They weren’t concerned with what was cool. Their attitude was, “Let’s encourage this kid to be artistic!” But what they were really doing was letting me hang myself in front of a classroom full of my judgmental, cannibalistic peers.
Even when my desire to bring joy was malfunctioning, I didn’t know how to turn it off. I just kept going until I found the right outlet: theater. I started to do a bit of it in middle school, but the real awakening came after we moved back down to California and I enrolled in Buena High.
My first day of high school, I showed up to campus without a clue of where to go or what to do. My mom and my stepdad were always so wrapped up in their own dramas that they weren’t very good at the technicalities of parenting, and because of that, I missed out on every bit of freshman orientation. My mom literally dropped me off on the first day and said, “Bye!” I didn’t know who any of my teachers were, didn’t know where any of my classes were, didn’t know where the cafeteria or the bathrooms were. I knew nothing and no one, not a soul, other than my older sister who didn’t want to hang out with me. I was all by myself, this thirteen-year-old kid who hadn’t hit puberty yet and who, at five feet four, was way smaller than everybody else in my class, a dwarf compared to the seniors. It was brutal. I give a lot of credit to the grace of God that I was able to make it through. That and the fact that, after what I’d been through in the Northwest, this place offered at least a slight glimmer of hope for a fresh start.
For about a month and a half, I spent every break and every lunch period walking around by myself. I’d have my backpack on and my hamburger and my Coke and my cookie, and I’d walk around eating by myself with no friends. Eventually, I found another kid who also didn’t know anybody, and we sat together for lunch. Then we found a third kid who didn’t know anybody, and now we had three. Then one day I saw a flyer up on the bulletin board that the theater department was auditioning for Frankenstein. Having done a few shows in middle school and loved them, this felt like it was meant to be. I auditioned, I got cast, and I never looked back.
Over the next four years, I did every possible show that could be done. I did the one-act festivals, the fall plays, the spring musicals. At Buena, we had the Big Theater and the Little Theater, and the Little Theater was where all the theater nerds hung out at breaks and at lunch. I had to tell my two buddies that I usually ate lunch with, “Hey, sorry, guys . . . I gotta go,” and I started hanging in the Little Theater every single day. I was there before school. I was there during school. I was there after school. I had found my tribe. I could be as nerdy as I wanted to with this crew. We could rock out to ABBA Gold and play Magic: The Gathering. I could sing and dance and do silly voices, and while it annoyed the hell out of the seniors, who were like, “Who the fuck is this fourteen-year-old goofball?”—it was okay, because they still cared about me and I still cared about them.
By senior year, I basically had all the credits I needed to graduate, which meant I could have been done with school by lunch. Almost anyone in my position would have said, “You mean, I can get out of here and go do something else? Hell, yeah. Let’s bounce.” Mind you, I wasn’t a huge fan of school, but I was a huge fan of socializing. I was a huge fan of community, and I for sure didn’t want to go home and be in that chaos. So I stayed. I took on two periods of being a teacher’s assistant so I could hang out. As soon as I did whatever clerical work the teachers needed me to do, which usually took about ten minutes tops, they’d let me fly. I’d walk around campus, pop into other people’s classes, hang out, tell some jokes, maybe make ’em laugh. Teachers would be like, “Zac, what are you doing here? Again?”
“Just stoppin’ by!” I’d say, grateful to them for putting up with me.
Always looking for a bigger stage, I started doing community theater up in in Ojai, a little town near Ventura, the summer after my freshman year of high school. Over the next few years there I got to play roles like Huck Finn in Big River, the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, and Jesus in Godspell. Most actors don’t get a big break working in small-town community theater, but Ojai was a teensy town that is incredibly well connected in Hollywood because a lot of big writers, directors, and actors have homes up there.
In February of 1999, I was eighteen years old and starring in a play up in Ojai called Marvin’s Room. In community theater, every night you go out and thank the audience as they leave, and one night this woman came through the line. She was this tiny lady, all of four feet nothing. I shook her hand and she looked up at me and said, “You’ve got it, kid, and I want to help you.”
It turned out that she’d been a manager in Hollywood for a long time. She saw my gift and wanted to help me share it. The next day she made some calls down to LA on my behalf, introducing me to another manager who introduced me to a casting agent, which then led to my being signed by Endeavor, one of the best agencies in Hollywood. For the next three years I was living at home, bussing tables and working at a car wash while commuting down to LA for auditions. Eventually, I booked a role in a TV movie and not long after that got cast in the pilot for a new sitcom, Less Than Perfect.
Less Than Perfect ran for four seasons on ABC and built the foundation of everything that came after. I was only twenty-one years old, and I’d gone from being the kid raised by TV to being the guy on TV, bringing laughter and smiles to countless faces. It was my dream coming true. But it held the potential to be my downfall. Because as The Enthusiast, in addition to this primary role of bringing joy, what I was also doing was avoiding pain, and I needed to stop avoiding pain.
Pain is necessary. It is your mind and your body telling you, “Hey! There’s something happening to you that you need to deal with.” I needed to experience my pain. I needed to digest it, metabolize it, and understand it. But I never did. I never stopped to let myself feel it. I was always under the impression that to let myself do that would be wallowing in misery and self-pity, which is always a potential danger. But there’s also a healthy need to sit with your pain long enough to process it. Once you have, you can go, “Okay, I’ve mourned it. I’ve seen the way it’s affecting me. I’ve learned the lessons I need to learn from it. I’ve made my peace with it, and now I can move on from it.” But Enthusiasts have a hard time doing that. We’re always racing to get ahead of the pain, and because we’re so fucking good at creating joy, we always have the ability to stay one step ahead of it.
Until we don’t.
When you’re an Enthusiast and you are not in a good or healthy place, you don’t merely avoid pain by spreading joy to others. You avoid pain by numbing it—and the best way to numb it is through the “fun” of gluttony. Gluttony is the result of Enthusiasts abusing and indulging their gifts in unhealthy ways. Enthusiasts are party people, literally. We will drink and smoke and party because we want to feel it all. We want the highest level of that intensity and that enthusiasm and the joy of the ever-growing, nonstop party in order to run away from the pain. And that, too, is me. My whole life I’ve always loved to host parties—dance parties especially. I love bringing people together. It’s in my DNA.
Trauma is an incredible thing. It’s a powerful thing, and what’s amazing is the way it can ingrain behaviors in you, unhealthy behaviors that can last your whole life, and you don’t even recognize that they’re there.
Enthusiasts can also struggle with FOMO. I’ve always had a hard time when someone says, “Hey, we’re doing a thing on Friday.” I struggle to commit to that party because, for all I know, between now and Friday something else may come up, and it’s going to be way cooler than whatever this thing is, and I don’t want to put myself in the corner committing to what this is going to be and losing out. It’s the same reason why I struggle so much at the ice cream shop. I have a hard time deciding which ice cream to pick, because if I choose one, I can’t have the others. That has happened to me my entire life. I thought I was just getting overwhelmed with options, but the reality was that I wanted to experience everything.
All through my high school and community theater years, I wasn’t exactly living on the straight and narrow. I’m not so sure you could say that the jocks partied harder than the theater nerds. The merriment we had probably put a lot of the football players to shame. It was not healthy. I was getting high with my buddies every day. We’d find each other every afternoon and say, “Who’s got the weed?” And then one of us would get the weed and we’d go get lit. At the time, I thought I was just having fun; I didn’t realize how much I was self-medicating to compensate for all the trauma I was experiencing at home.
You may be able to bring joy to others while self-medicating, but you may well be dulling your gifts, and potentially wasting them in self-indulgence. Focusing your gift on indulging yourself is, in the end, a masturbatory practice of ever-diminishing returns. Eventually the noise of the party will no longer drown out the pain. You don’t ever get healthy, and the hole inside you never gets filled. That hole can only ever be filled by sharing your gifts with the world, fulfilling your purpose and becoming your higher self—a person who is in communion with your community, your Creator, and all of creation.
There’s the old saying that “Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness.” The dichotomy of bringing joy and avoiding pain fits that pretty well. But the Enneagram adds a layer of complexity that I think a lot of people miss. The armor we create for ourselves, the coping mechanism we use to protect ourselves, can be the very thing that’s hurting us in the long run even as it’s propping us up in the short run.
That’s what had happened to me. Creating joy for others kept me afloat—it kept me alive. I wouldn’t have survived without my ability to do that. At the same time, it was killing me because I was only avoiding the pain I needed to reckon with. For thirty-seven years, I’d told myself, “I got this. Yeah, I’ve had some hard shit happen to me, but I can throw a party and I can have fun and I can be happy and I can go use my skills as an actor to go entertain people and surround myself with the people I’ve made happy, and I can keep doing this forever.” On the rare occasions that the pain and the trauma caught up to me, I got to be good at fixing myself up and moving on. Something would hit me, and mess me up, but I’d self-medicate with a little drugs, some booze, some girls. I’d do whatever it took to patch myself up, and soon I’d be back on my feet and on the move again, never looking back at that thing that had knocked me down. I would always tell myself, “I’m okay. I’ve gotten through it. I can just keep going. I don’t need to look down. I’m good.”
But I wasn’t.