I caught
this interesting discussion of the Myers-Briggs personality types of John and Sherlock, and it got me thinking. (That's never a good start, is it?) And before you go thinking that hey, a lot of this sounds like the
Hogwarts house self-sorting personal brain splat I did in another post, but with psychology terms shotgunned all over it, you'd be right. You'd be very very right. But I've honestly meant to do this for years now because, well. I'll get to that. Various cuts in this post are for length and to save you from reading too much personal drek if you don't want to.
I've taken the Myers-Briggs personality test a handful of times in my life. I remember early on -- I was a teenager -- I was an INTJ, and I felt that that suited me down to the
ground. INTJ -- the Scientist. Rarest of all types. I remember feeling smug about it, too.
( Read more... )But that isn't so much me anymore. Hasn't been for a long time. That was a younger me, a me that was probably in full bloom in high school. Brash and headstrong, fueled by self-righteousness (and often pubescent rage), resulting in what looked like self-confidence, but I'm not sure it ever was. And I'm forever frustrated that I can't go back and interview my old self, beat the truth out of the fabric of reality itself. I really want to know and won't ever be able to. Did the test take that into account? But I remember
being that person: I was impatient and looking for
results, wanting other people to get with the program and just hurry up already, I'm
waiting. I had a clear idea of who I was and what I wanted out of every interaction, every field I was studying, everything I did. Even reading the description of INTJ now, I see a lot of myself in it, my past self and a little of me now, the bits I bury and make the choice to ignore. I recognize myself in those words, some version of me I no longer have access to 100% of the time.
( Read more... )I took the test again in college, and once more right out of college -- and then twice today. I don't remember the college and post-college ones (they're in an email somewhere and I can't find them), but I just remember realizing that I was no longer an INTJ, and it felt like I completely lost track of who I was. I just became something else, following the depression of college, the trauma of rebuilding my social life when my romantic one couldn't prop it up anymore, and then professional dissatisfaction, bordering on failure. I was just...someone else when the fires subsided. I had to be. Someone my high school self wouldn't have recognized. And if it felt like death throes between 2001 and 2007, I guess that made sense. I was being reforged as someone else.
Today, I took the test twice, back to back. Unadvisable, probably, but I took it once and hemmed and hawed over fully a third of
the questions because there just weren't easy ways to answer them. I got ISFJ that time. The second time, I made more snap decisions, really made myself pick an answer and didn't even remember what I'd picked the first time (because there was
that much hemming and hawing). And I got ESFP. Screenshots of the percentage loadouts and personality descriptions under the cut, but I definitely feel ISFJ is a lot more on the money than ESFP.
( Read more... )So this is the thing I've been thinking about for years: I knew, have known for years, that I was no longer INTJ. And I wondered what, if anything, I could draw from the transition to what I am now. What I've been in the interim. And maybe I'm not supposed to do this sort of narrative theming of my life (or maybe I am? I really, really should have gone to therapy when I was most depressed in my life so I'd have a better sense of this now), but this is, in any event, what I'm doing.
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