The Toughest Profile: 3/5

To be a 3/5 is the toughest profile (I am biased). It’s a geometry which is designed to make mistakes, designed to fail, and here to universalise those failures into substantiated truths. Many of us feel like misfits or screw ups; we are incredibly hard on ourselves. Everyone is projecting onto you you’re the bee’s knees and internally you’re waiting to fall flat on your face. 

We’re crazy. We don’t listen. We’re stubborn. We have a mutative streak. We change constantly. We run into messes and fires clearly too far gone, but there’s a part of us that goes “maybe, just maybe, we can save this one”.

We are inherently chaotic. But we don’t want to be. We hate making and breaking bonds, even when we have no choice but to do so. All we aspire to is sustainment as a third line - the joke is of course that’s never going to happen.

Breaking bonds is about taking space. It’s rarely forever. We need time apart and then when we come back, it’s a completely different dynamic, a different relationship. We are new people each time we return. We shed skins, learn lessons, burn identities, and maybe return a little more wiser than we were before. That we can only hope after making the same mistake for the third time (third time’s a charm, right?)

Everything we ever do has a purpose. Even if it’s a dead end. Even if it doesn’t make sense. Even if it is so unrelated you don’t know how you can bridge that gap. It all counts. Every single fuck up and mistake counts. It builds your character. Probably a good sense of humour too. 

We’re anarchists and we’re heretics. Everyone wants to be a heretic these days because it became “cool”. Well, it’s not. It’s a real buzz kill. You have to tell people what doesn’t work, which always has an undertone of guilt. People can be suspicious of you and don’t want to trust you, like you do with them.

You say what others are too afraid to say and they resent you because of it. They’re often waiting for the one slip-up so they can burn you at the stake, so they can cancel you, so they can go and tell everybody “I knew it, I knew they weren’t the one”. If you’re a heretic, people are going to talk about you: you will have a reputation whether you like it or not. No wonder fifth lines are paranoid. 

But the 3/5 doesn’t even know they’re a heretic. We’re not conscious of it. This personality feels like it’s a clumsy fraud and then people have expectations for us to deliver on what they see? Woah. It constantly feels like you’re pretending and fumbling your way through the dark until whoops! You bang into something or someone. And that was on public display. 

We’re realists. We’re pragmatic. We’re often likeable for the fact we’re not put together and we have endless life experience to prove it. Or you find us endearing in the way we can just keep going no matter what embarrassing mistake we’ve just made. We could have a broken leg, smashed our head open, and yet we get up and carry on. It’s truly admirable. We don’t give up. The third line gift is this stubborn persistence to find a way, to find the solution that works no matter the cost. 

All we ever want to discover is a universal truth. We want to find something solid. We want to find something that lasts. The pessimism can run so deep. And it can really bruise us if it’s turned inwards towards ourselves. This is the martyr. Why me? Why does this always happen to me? Why can’t I find the relationship that lasts? The job that can continue to stimulate me and encourage me in my own experimentation-process?

But the pessimism is here to serve us — it is not here to be directed at ourselves. We are here to be skeptical. We know that Murphy’s Law always applies — what can go wrong will go wrong. But that skepticism helps us in not trusting anything we have not verified for ourselves, that we have not found to be true through our own trial and error process. You come to us with anything and we will have our doubts it will work. It protects us.  

Our profile is a costume. It feels weird and awkward and is cut too big in the beginning of the process. But then it gets tailored. It starts to fit better. You feel comfortable in it. Heck, you may even start to like it. 

But you can’t ever be rid of it. I’m stuck with making and breaking things, with a personality that is constantly going to be pushing boundaries and discovering what’s true for me. Yes I have been scarred. But I was born for this; I heal quickly. 

You may never truly understand the 3/5. You may never quite grasp why we are the way we are. That’s okay. I find it strange that other people’s geometries can be so… stable. That’s only an illusory concept to me. And to be honest, the instability makes for an interesting movie. If not entertaining for us, at least for everybody else.