Sunday, August 19, 2007

Reflections upon the occasion of my being a special snowflake

I've come full circle. I got the INFJ (well, don't that sound vaguely medical) back when I first started playing around with Myers-Briggs stuff, probably around freshman year of high school. Over the eight (eight? omfg) years since then, my personality has proven fickle, cycling from INFJ to INFP to INTP to INTJ to INTP to my present INFJ state (though I tested as INTP, the "Loser"--perceptive!--as recently as a week ago). In the interest of navel gazery, I'm breaking this shit down:

I - well, duh. I hadn't imagined that I'd be up in the 80% range of introversion, but eh, not even too surprised by that. I do like people, but I am and always will be an introvert.

N - I guess I'm a dyed-in-the-wool intuiter, too, but lord knows I've never really understood what that meant. I'll smile, nod and go with it, 'cause it doesn't seem like it's gonna change any time soon.

Now, the tricky parts. Notwithstanding the idiosyncratic 68% Judging result in my personality badge on the blog sidebar, I'm hardly ever over 55% on any one of Thinking, Feeling, Judging OR Perceiving. This is where the desire to answer "but it depends!" to so many of these personality test questions probably does the most to impede said tests from assigning me, once and for all, forever and ever amen, a personality:

T/F - looking at my history I apparently went through a significant T-leaning phase. Unsurprising, given that a lot of my identity had grown to revolve around a respect for critical thinking, general smarty-pantsitude, intellectual snobbery and deification of logic etc. (Thankfully, I have evolved somewhat.) I think the F is correct here, though--whenever I make a big decision, I tend to go with what feels right. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of facts and reason and all that jazz, and I spend forever thinking and finding a way to logically justify what I believe is compelling... er, wait, wouldn't that just make me a hopelessly subjective rationalizer? (Well, we're all hopelessly subjective rationalizers...) Or wait (again), maybe the "feeling" I describe is really "intuition." Yeah. I think it is. So why the hell am I an F? Just because I can be emotional? Cause I picked mercy over justice (mercy CAN be just, fuckers..)? Or what? ...okay I don't want to talk about this anymore or I may have to go lie down for awhile.

J/P - now, this one's interesting to me as a general category. My understanding of the difference is that J-leaners like to check things off lists, have decisions made and out of the way, get tasks done and so forth. P-leaners are go with the flow, open to change, flexible, and have a vaguely earth-mothery all-is-connected-and-is-endlessly-evolving sort of view of the world. Now, I love making lists and ESPECIALLY crossing things off lists. Ooh, how I love crossing things off lists. It's like huffing ether or something. Er, anyway... so in that manner I can definitely see how I'd come up "J." Thing is, I view this as a character flaw. Not the narcotic thrill I get from striking through various tasks with my lovely extra-fine-tipped roller ball pen (although I guess that's a little weird), but to have such a closed-down view of the world. It's the control-freak mindset, and more than that, it's a basically faulty outlook. We're never really "done" with anything. Always more information to be taken into account, revisions to be made, infinite rivers to step in and all that. The P's have it. Or they have the right approach to successfully deal with it. I dunno, anyone want to put a different spin on this or redeem the J side of things for me?

Wow--that there was a lot of blather about myself. Granted, I DO score fairly high on intrapersonal intelligence over on aforementioned personality badge. Gotta keep my skillz sharp somehow.

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Reductionism who in the what now?