Miley Cyrus: Enneagram 7w8

Why Miley Cyrus is a Type 7

• Fun as an explicit justification for provocative behavior. When defending her notorious 2013 MTV Video Music Awards performance, Cyrus rejected the expectation that it should have been restrained or dignified. “I thought that’s what the VMAs were all about,” she said. “It’s not the Grammys or the Oscars. You’re not supposed to show up in a gown, Vanna White-style. It’s supposed to be fun!”

• Wild, improvisational behavior even within an ordinary interview. A 2013 Rolling Stone profile followed Cyrus as she got a tattoo, went skydiving, and drank a cocktail made from Gatorade and Malibu rum during the course of the reporting. Her comments about the VMAs were similarly loose and self-mocking. She said she had not been trying to appear sexy, joked about looking like “a little creature” with “the flattest ass ever,” and predicted she would probably never repeat the performance.

• Change, newness, and speed described as explicit psychological needs. In a personal essay for Vanity Fair, Cyrus called herself “a creative vessel that thrives on change and evolution.” She added that the “never-satisfied artist” within her “becomes bored easily,” and connected this directly to the speed of her life: “So I move through life quickly.”

• Difficulty remaining in calm for very long. In the same essay, Cyrus said she has a stable “home base and center” that offers calm and peace, but immediately qualified it: “I can’t be in it for too long but it’s a place to catch my breath.” Calm is presented less as a place to inhabit than as a temporary pause before she begins moving again.

• High energy that has to be fully expended. Cyrus has described waking up with so much energy that she needs to exhaust herself before she can settle: “I have to get worn out and exhausted to feel like I’ve gone through the energy that I wake up with every morning.” She has also spoken about disliking sleep and rest, suggesting that activity is not merely something she enjoys but something she experiences as physically necessary.

• A public identity built around continually becoming someone new. Discussing the many abrupt changes in her appearance, music, and behavior, Cyrus said that people treat change as though it were an accusation: “People will say, ‘You’ve changed.’ And that’s supposed to be derogatory. But you are supposed to change all the time.” When people asked for the “old Miley” back, she responded, “You can’t tell me who that is. I’m right here.”

• Authenticity understood as being true to the current moment. Cyrus has insisted that her reinventions do not mean her previous personas were false. “Who I was on the last record was really who I am,” she said. “It’s just myself has been a lot of different people because I change a lot.”

• Down for anything. Discussing sexuality and relationships in 2015, Cyrus used strikingly expansive language: “I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting.” She added, “Everything that’s legal, I’m down with,” and resisted requiring either herself or her partners to fit fixed gender categories.

• Attraction to emotional and experiential extremes. Cyrus has said, “I love to feel, and to feel extremes.” She later connected her rapidly changing emotions to the excitement they produce: “How I feel can be drastic but life is fun, thrilling, and exhilarating this way.” She describes intensity as part of what makes life vivid and enjoyable.

• Movement and new experiences used to cope with loss. After losing her Malibu home, divorcing Liam Hemsworth, and experiencing the death of her grandmother, Cyrus said she did not spend much time crying because crying would not change what had happened. “I tried to just continue to be active in what I can control,” she explained, “otherwise you just start feeling like you’re trapped.” She then described her preferred method of recovery directly: “I heal through traveling and meeting new people.”

• Positive framing and an emphasis on what makes life enjoyable. Cyrus repeatedly uses language of enjoyment, gratitude, and positive possibility. In her Vanity Fair essay, she described life as “fun, thrilling, and exhilarating” and expressed gratitude to the fans who had supported every different “space” she had occupied. Her interviews similarly contain frequent, emphatic declarations about what she loves, what excites her, and what she appreciates.

• Assertive insistence on personal freedom, suggestive of an 8 wing. Cyrus’s openness is accompanied by considerable force and conviction. Reflecting on the message underlying “We Can’t Stop,” she summarized it as, “I’m going to do whatever I want.”