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I thought it’d be interesting to start my own wee series on personalities and my experience with the Myers-Briggs 16-types; if you’re unfamiliar with Myers-Briggs go here to take a test. Obviously assigning a letter to your personality is a bit more simplistic than the nuances in each of us, but nonetheless, I think it helps us to understand ourselves, each other and why you are attracted to certain types of people more than others.

For this first post, I’m going to talk a bit about some of the similarities I’ve noticed in Bryce and myself as we’re both I’s and both J’s (introverted judgers). I used to think being introverted was bad — like you were a geek, had no friends and didn’t like people generally. But I’ve come to see it more about how one needs recharging. For instance, Bryce’s brother seems to have endless supplies of energy and will be out late most nights with a different group of people each night; just thinking about that makes me tired and a bit anxious (how would I make effective conversation/small talk to loads of people I don’t know?) As far as the two of us, thankfully we’re not super introverted so we do have lots of fun in big groups; but that said, we probably won’t be the ones staying up to all hours with huge groups (small dinner parties are different) and we wouldn’t be caught dead clubbing or out partying with a bunch of hot, sweaty people clad in tiny skirts and furry boots. This of course is helpful as we’re likeminded on this front; we can sense (both being Ns as well) when the other is ready to go back to our basement flat and enjoy quiet and solitude. (I would consider this state of solitude as being just the two of us as well, not just me on my own, although I like that too). Oddly, I think that I’ve become more extroverted with age while Bryce needs a bit more quiet than I do; that’s why he’s in his boxroom most of the time and that’s why he needs to just be alone after we argue sometimes, I think.

We’re also (strong) judgers — planners, to-do-listers, likes-to-know-what’s-happening-nexters, and having thing generally figured out and solved (or in the process of concluding). Erratic behaviour is maddening. Both being J’s is great in so many ways: we can plan vacations together and we both know what we want out of our times away, we work well discussing future events and settling on plans. In the past however, I think it’s made it so we don’t “go with the flow” enough; we don’t allow enough spontaneity in our lives and the J in us often means we expect a whole lot (especially consistency) from each other; which as flawed human beings is difficult to follow through with to say the very least. I think too, because we’re so similar in lots of ways it can make us judge others who have opposite characteristics than us in a bad way (not always of course, but sometimes). Because we’re similar, the people who differ from us are “odd” or “weird” rather than just “different”; basically they don’t seem to make sense to us. Of course we do have our “P” tendencies in such things as procrastination and learning to be okay with life as fundamentally open-ended in several areas.

This entry was posted by Ashley on Monday, April 18th, 2005 at 2:23 pm. This entry was tagged with Personality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.