My MBTI Personality: INTJ?

Hello, gang! Welcome back to another session of my random thoughts, sporadically posted as I find the mental energy and drive needed to spew them onto the page. Before I dive into the theme of today’s post, I thought I’d give y’all a brief update on what life is like right now for me. I’m taking ten credits of college this term, which will fulfill my requirements for my Associate of Arts degree. I expect to graduate in June (yay!). I’m very ready to be done and move on… even though I kind of have no clue what I’ll end up doing with my life beyond this point. Writing like mad, hopefully. Speaking of writing, I’m participating in Camp NaNo this month! What is Camp NaNo, you might ask? Well, some of you may recall that in November I (unofficially) won a challenge hosted by National Novel Writing Month to write 50,000 words in those thirty-one days. The NaNo organization has expanded from doing just the one annual challenge to hosting many other events during the year, including Camp NaNo, in which writers get to set their own goals and join virtual “cabins” to receive encouragement from other writers. (Shoutout to my Chatter Box girls! You ladies are awesome!) My goal was to write/edit/brainstorm for 1,800 minutes this month. I was unexpectedly blessed with a temporary farming job and company this last week, so I fell pretty far behind on that goal, but I’m going to dive back in and see if I can’t make up for lost time. Anywho, with all that out of the way, here’s the post you came for! Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator (or MBTI) is a personality test that offers sixteen different combinations of traits. Each of the sixteen personalities is denoted by four letters (i.e. ISTJ, ENFP), and there are two options for each letter in the sequence. You can be either Introverted or Extroverted, rely on Sensing or iNtuition, Think or Feel, and Judge or Perceive. For my senior capstone project, I was required to take this test. My psychology-obsessed little self was thrilled. I completed the test and pored over the results. According to this particular test, I was an INTJ, but instead of just giving me the numbers, they also indicated how much I preferred each cognitive function over its alternative. I was strongest in Introversion and Judging, with 69% and 72% preferences, respectively. I had only a 19% preference for iNtuition and an even smaller 9% preference for Thinking. Okay, so that was pretty interesting, but at that point, I didn’t understand much about what those terms meant, so I moved on to the description of the INTJ type, which I read with mounting excitement. A lot of people don’t put a lot of stock in MBTI. Which is fair. People can’t be boiled down completely into a combination of four characteristics, and clinging too tightly to ill-fitting labels can do a lot of harm. However, I maintain that for me, getting the results of INTJ did me a lot of good, and here’s why. As a kid, I felt pretty out-of-place. I spent my middle childhood years (defined by developmental psychologists as ages six to eleven, during which individuals typically develop a self-concept for the first time) in a very rural area. My interactions with those outside my family were limited to church, school (in which there were only four other students besides my brothers and I), and 4-H. And in all of those spheres, I struggled to fit in. My peers would seem to look at me oddly whenever I spoke up or tried to befriend them. It was as if I was an alien, and they couldn’t quite figure out what to do with me. My thinking seemed to be different than everyone else’s. Who else got that rush of excitement from burrowing into a grammar textbook and learning parts of speech? Who else was exhilarated by history and intrigued by the laws of science, or awed by the ability of a novelist to weave together a living, breathing world of lifelike characters capable of keeping a reader glued to the page and deeply moved by its contents? My mind was always busy piecing things together and ruminating. I loved understanding how things work. But no one else seemed to care. Other people seemed to be in school just because they had to and didn’t care to learn the things they were taught. Other people seemed to blindly follow social traditions without questioning the purposes behind them. Of course, the longer I found myself an outsider, the stranger these practices seemed to me, and the more superficial. People were expected to just go out and “make friends”? Pick a random person and form an alliance? And then you were supposed to get together and… hang out? What kind of vague, pointless social expectation was that? And then there was home life. My one and only in-group. But even there I didn’t always feel like I belonged. My dad has a very different personality than I do. Whereas I am high in linguistic intelligence and “book smarts,” my dad has a lot more practical intelligence. He is a brilliant mechanic and troubleshooter. He ingrained in me a deep appreciation of physical work. Unfortunately, my analytical little brain didn’t like to launch me into tasks. I was slow and methodical. I thought everything through from every possible angle before trying a new task and was always afraid that I would mess it up if I tried to tinker on something that I didn’t fully understand. And this was way too slow for my dad. As I was growing up, a part of me felt like the way I thought was a special gifting, a super power. But most of the time, it seemed like the way I thought was fundamentally wrong somehow, and the world had no place for someone like me. When I read through the description of an INTJ, so many pieces of myself clicked into place right in front of me. I had poked around in my brain quite a bit, so much of the information wasn’t new to me. Instead, it was like rediscovering a favorite song that had turned into faint, haunting wisps of melody without the words. For one of the first times in my life, I felt truly understood as I saw myself reflected back to me through the text. I’m obsessed with understanding how things work and dissecting structure and function. Of my many interests, I selected key areas to focus on from a young age (namely, writing) and threw myself wholeheartedly into them, storing up mounds of specialized information. I’m strongly aware of what I do and don’t know and won’t offer advice on an area that isn’t my specialty. I can be awkward socially. I used to be horribly perfectionistic (I’ll have to write a post on this sometime, because this trait has given me a LOT of interesting stories to share). I can be very black and white and critical when it comes to executing tasks. Incompetence riles me. All of a sudden, it all made sense. I had poor relationships with my peers not because I was a freak or an alien but because of personality. The biggest thing I appreciated about exploring the INTJ type was that I got to see another side of myself than what I usually looked at. I far too often saw my negative attributes and all the things that made me feel less competent than others or less compatible with them. I saw my rigidity, my obsessions, my awkwardness. What I didn’t see was that for the few people I let into my inner circle of friends (or who knocked down my walls and barged inside and forced me to experience companionship, whichever the case may be), it is in my nature to work for the success of that relationship, to strategize and change with the changing seasons, and to attack division with the ferocity of a horse trying to murder piglets (don’t ask). And I do this in other areas of my life, too. I have been seriously pursuing a writing career for eight years now. I haven’t published yet (thank you, perfectionism), but I’m continuing to grow and pursue my goals, no matter what it takes. I’m intentional, I’m hardworking, and I’m willing to grow, and those seem like pretty good traits to me. How about you, my dear readers? What are some tools that have helped you understand yourself or others better? Do you find personality typing useful, or not? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments (whether on the blog or Facebook) or by replying to my newsletter (for my email subscribers). I would love to get to know you more! If time and mental energy allows, I plan to return to this topic to explore the two additional types that MBTI tests have since given me and my thoughts on those results. Am I really INTJ? Or am I something else? Stay tuned for more!